Beggar had probably been afraid all his life. Don’t know what started it. But over now. Hadn’t had time to be afraid with the buff. That and being angry too . . . Fear gone like an operation. Something else grew in its place. Main thing a man had. Made him into a man. Women knew it too. No bloody fear.
Meanwhile, throughout Francis’ ecstatic celebration of his newfound control of his life, and as Wilson admires Francis’ impressive hunting action, Margot is icily quiet, only expressing her disgust at the hunt. She too has seen the change in Francis, and it worries her, for she is losing control of him: “Her contempt was not secure. She was very afraid of something.” 33 In an essential passage, the frightened Margot confronts Francis about his sudden bravery: “Isn’t it too late?” she asks. He responds, “Not for me”, expressing that only now in the last few moments has he had any control in the entirety of his life. 34
Just as Harry in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” decides to pick up his pen and write again in order to combat the surrounding nada, Francis picks up his gun and decides to act upon the awareness he has gained during his personal journey from sheltered innocence through self-assessing suffering to a singular confrontation with nada. It is part of Francis’ shauri as a hunter to finish what he has started with the buffalo; Wilson taught him that with the lion but it took the painful realizations Francis had overnight and the stoic encouragement of Wilson to make Francis willing to fulfill his shauri. There is one final moment of tutelage just prior to the point where Wilson and the new Francis, the Francis ready to act with dignity, head into the bush. This moment follows the pattern of all the previous occurrences of sincere tutelage in that it takes place away from Margot, away from nada. Wilson offers some advice on what to expect from the wounded bull and bluntly states how difficult it will be to bring the bull down. Compared with his cowardice at the lion incident, it is obvious from Francis’ reaction that he is not the same person he once was 35:
Macomber felt his heart pounding and his mouth was dry again, but it was excitement, not fear.
In the story’s conclusion, Francis stands his ground firing as the bull charges him, only to be shot with an elephant gun from behind by Margot, who watches from the car (an interior, safe location where she risks nothing). Wilson finishes the shauri which Francis and he had been partners on and then, standing over Macomber’s ripped apart head and body, coldly attacks Margot’s malicious destruction of her husband: “Why didn’t you just poison him? That’s what they do in England.” 36
“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” offers a dim hope for the cause of self-betterment through the exercise of free will. Francis does attain the awareness he strives for, but at the cost of wasting his entire (adult) life in the realm of nada before realizing, through exposure to raw fear and danger, that he has no courage — not enough to stand up to a wounded lion, nor his wife, nor his own decrepit moral values of money and Societal standing. Wilson helps Francis along the journey by providing a quiet but compelling example of a man who has faced fear, faced nada, and overcome them. In the end, though, the forces of determinism win out over Francis. If Francis is victorious, in many ways he is a phyrric victor. He stands firing, happy and exhilarated, in an ultimate act of free will and courage as the bull charges him, only to be shot in the back (literally) by his wife, the representation of all that he has come to reject, the representation of nada. Hemingway’s message is quite clear: it is a hellish struggle to make something of yourself in the modern world, and there are few things you can trust, and you can never count on anything good lasting very long, and if you find something worth holding on to you had better hold tightly because the rest of the world will try like hell to ruin it for you, and the odds are in their favor. After Margot shoots Francis even Wilson’s biting, sarcastic attacks on her ultimately ring hollow in comparison to the overwhelming sensation the reader gets that all of Francis’ suffering, indeed his entire life, was almost completely for naught. Hemingway’s perfect little title reveals the only part of Francis Macomber’s life that really counted or mattered: those short, happy moments of the buffalo hunt. Everything else was nada.
Notes List
(page numbers without an author are from the text of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”)
1Grebstein, p. 16
2Grebstein, pp. 5-7
3p. 21. Francis lies alone in bed the night after the lion incident consoling himself by thinling of what he knows:
His wife had been through with him before but it never lasted. He was very wealthy, and he would be much wealthier, and he knew she would not leave him ever now. That was one of the few things that he really knew. He knew about that, about motor cycles — that was the earliest — about motor cars, about duck-shooting, about fishing, trout, salmon and big sea, about sex in books, many books, too many books, about all court games, about dogs, not much about horses, about hanging on to his money, about most of the other things his world dealt in, and about his wife not leaving him.
(italics added). All of these things mean nothing to Francis on the safari; none of them give him any basis for courage.
4p. 6
5p. 22. As proof of the “canned experience” nature of the safari, a Societal magazine in New York had the following to report on the Macomber’s trip:
They were adding more than a spice of adventure to their much envied and ever-enduring Romance by a Safari in what was known as Darkest Africa . . .
6p. 7
7ibid.
8p. 26
9p. 26; p. 23 respectively
10p. 7
11Rovit, p. 60
12p. 5
13p. 18
14p. 8
15ibid.
16p. 12
17p. 8
18previous three quotations in essay text, pp. 10-11
19p. 11
20p. 23
21p. 24
22p. 25
23ibid.
24p. 28
25p. 29
26p. 30
27p. 29
28p. 30
29p. 31
30ibid.
31previous three quotations in essay text, p. 32
32p. 33
33p. 34
34ibid.
35p. 35
36p. 37
List
Grebstein, Sheldon Norman. “The Structure of Hemingway’s Short Stories”. in Hemingway’s Craft. Southern Illinois University Press. Carbondale and Edwardsville.
Hemingway, Ernest. “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”. in The Short Stories. Scribner/Simon & Schuster, New York. 1995.
Rovit, Earl. “Of Tutors and Tyros.” in Ernest Hemingway. Twayne Publishers, Inc. New York.
Other Sources
Bruccoli, Matthew J. Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. University Press of Mississippi. Jackson and London. 1986.
Hoffman, Steven K. “‘Nada’ and the Clean, Well-Lighted Place: The Unity of Hemingway’s Short Fiction.” in Essays in Literature 6, no. 1. Spring, 1979.
Waldhorn, Arthur. “Style”. in A Reader’s Guide to Ernest Hemingway.