Of Ernest Hemingway's short story, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", author Frank O'Connor wrote:
"Francis runs away from a lion, which is what most sensible men would do if faced by a lion, and his wife promptly cuckolds him with the English manager of their big-game hunting expedition. As we all know, good wives admire nothing in a husband except his capacity to deal with lions, so we can sympathize with the poor woman in her trouble. But next day Macomber, faced with a buffalo, suddenly becomes a man of superb courage, and his wife, recognizing that[...] for the future she must be a virtuous wife, blows his head off. [...] To say that the psychology of this story is childish would be to waste good words. As farce it ranks with "Ten Nights in a Bar Room" or any other Victorian morality you can think of. Clearly, it is the working out of a personal problem that for the vast majority of men and women has no validity whatever."
"Francis runs away from a lion, which is what most sensible men would do if faced by a lion, and his wife promptly cuckolds him with the English manager of their big-game hunting expedition. As we all know, good wives admire nothing in a husband except his capacity to deal with lions, so we can sympathize with the poor woman in her trouble. But next day Macomber, faced with a buffalo, suddenly becomes a man of superb courage, and his wife, recognizing that[...] for the future she must be a virtuous wife, blows his head off. [...] To say that the psychology of this story is childish would be to waste good words. As farce it ranks with "Ten Nights in a Bar Room" or any other Victorian morality you can think of. Clearly, it is the working out of a personal problem that for the vast majority of men and women has no validity whatever."
I found this quote on Wikipedia, so I could be taking O'Connor's comments out of context. I don't know what else he said about the story, but I did read the Hemingway story, and wow, does this ever miss the boat.
First: sure, it would be sensible to run away from a lion, in almost any circumstance, but what would not be sensible would be to run away from a lion when you have paid someone to take you on a safari with the intention of hunting and killing dangerous animals and when you are expecting to encounter a lion and are armed to the teeth in preparation for such an event; and second: it would most certainly not be sensible to run away from a lion (which you have gone out of your way to track down in the first place) when you are married to an unprincipled and adulterous woman and spend a good deal of time doubting your worth as a human being and, more importantly, as a man.
Speaking of Francis's "wife": O'Connor's remarks fail to say much of anything about the woman's character, or the already fucked-up condition of the marriage between she and her husband. He writes as if this single event causes her to sleep with Wilson, the safari guide and ultra-macho big-game hunter. There is a lot of history backing up the events which O'Connor so flippantly describes. Mrs. Macomber doesn't love her husband and remains married to him for all the wrong reasons. Most likely she would have fucked Wilson anyway. She's a cruel and unscrupulous bitch and she enjoys causing her husband pain. In some respects Francis deserves to be humiliated. He should have ditched his wife a long time ago. He shouldn't have married her to begin with. And he has a lot of silly hang-ups about what constitutes a "real man", although, in his defense, these hang-ups could well have been directly caused by his train-wreck of a marriage.
I don't entirely agree with O'Connor's comments in regard to the reasons Mrs. Macomber kills her husband. I do agree that she recognizes the change in him once he passes his silly manhood-test, as do Wilson and Macomber himself, but she doesn't kill him because she realizes that she will have to be a "virtuous wife". As I said, this memsahib is a cruel and ruthless bitch and being a virtuous anything is completely beyond her capacity, which of course she realizes; but more than that, she understands that her power over Francis is gone, that her primary source of sadistic pleasure has been tapped. She isn't unfaithful because of her husband's shortcomings, she merely uses them as an excuse for being the miserable cunt that she is. She doesn't realize that she will have to be a virtuous wife to Francis, she realizes that she will have to find another sap to abuse, that she will have to do a little work for a change in her efforts to pussy-whip another spineless sucker. Not only that, she is simply enraged that her little powder puff has risen up. Well, a bullet to the noggin puts paid to that, doesn't it?
The story is hostile and devoid of heroes but the psychology behind it is anything but childish. Unless you're reading it wrong. And Hemingway's writing is dead-on. I was a fool to ignore him until now. His influence is so huge that I've been imitating him without knowing it. But then I'm a hack so that's no surprise.
