Papa's Projections

 In a post back in 2018, I remarked on a passage from Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa which finds Papa whining to Mama about how Gertrude Stein never appreciated him enough. Hemingway's then-wife, who is cast in the memoir in the role of simpering condoler and remover of every thorn lodged in Papa lion's paw, replies: "She's just jealous and malicious. You never should have helped her. Some people never forgive that." The irony, I observed, is that Papa is actually the one who repaid Stein with ingratitude for her assistance in his career. 

It appears on further reading that not only was I correct, I had if anything underestimated the full extent of Hemingway's pattern of ingratitude. He was, upon closer inspection, a serial backstabber, an incorrigibly Oedipal slayer of benefactors. Sherwood Anderson, who gave him his start? Hemingway wrote a whole book mocking him. But it didn't stop there. There was also Ford Madox Ford, whom Hemingway skewered in prose, despite the latter publishing his works and facilitating his career. 

Basil Bunting, whom Ford rescued from a road-digging gig in France and other manual drudgery by giving him his first real literary job as an assistant on the Transatlantic Review, accused Hemingway of having perpetrated "a lie" about Ford, "deliberately assembled to damage the reputation of a dead man." (See Neil Astley's biographical essay on Bunting in the Bloodaxe Books edition of Briggflatts). 

Why did Hemingway feel the need to destroy and slander everyone who had ever helped him? Is it that the son needed to slay his parents if he were ever to become Papa himself? That there was only room in his life for one Papa and it needed to be him? 

Or perhaps Mama is right on the money when she observes: "Some people can never forgive" a favor. After all, a helping hand—however much it may be fleetingly appreciated in an hour of need—can come to sting later on as a reminder of dependence. I quoted Alinsky before on this point, but here it is again: "It is a human characteristic that someone who asks for help and gets it reacts not only with gratitude but with a subconscious hostility toward the one who helped him [.... H]e feels that the one who helped him is always aware that if it hadn't been for his help, he would still be a defeated nothing."

(Wallace Stegner must have had such a theory as this—or perhaps the line from Hemingway—in mind when he wrote, in Crossing to Safety: "There is a revisionist theory, one of those depth-psychology distortions or half-truths that crop up like toadstools whenever the emotions get infected by the mind, that says we hate worst those who have done the most for us. According to this belittling and demeaning theory, gratitude is a festering sore. Maybe it is, if it's insisted on.") 

Another similar observation appears in Basil Bunting again, bringing this full circle. A long-ish narrative poem Bunting wrote, "Chomei at Toyama," is a condensation in verse of a medieval Japanese prose work by a Buddhist convert Kamo no Chomei. There are a few places, though, where Bunting's work departs from the original, and one of these concerns the psychological phenomenon of ingratitude. The annotations in Don Shore's volume of Bunting's poems point out that the original laments the fact that: "if one has helped someone, one is pursued by his gratitude and devotion."

Bunting puts a modern psychological spin on this same complaint by reversing the roles. His version of Chomei, in the poem, declares, speaking of "a poor man living amongst the rich": "Whoever helps him enslaves him/and follows him crying out: Gratitude!" In other words, receiving the help of another places us in their power; it reminds us of our dependence, and gives them leverage to call in favors. And this in turn often breeds a resentment which many find they cannot forgive. Mama would be proud. So would Alinsky. (It might even count as "insisting on" gratitude sufficient to bring Stegner on board.)

Mama's observation, then, is an acute psychological insight. It just happens to be misdirected. Hemingway places it in her mouth in order to vindicate himself against Gertrude Stein. But really it should have been said of him. 

"[H]ow odd it was," a character thinks to herself in Henry Green's novel Party Going, "that people always seemed to dislike in others just what they were always doing themselves[.]" Certainly that seems to be what is going on with Hemingway. Papa is engaged here in an act of projection. Of course, this too makes psychological sense. My sister always talks about the phenomenon of the "shadow self." The people we dislike and criticize most, she says, are those who seem to embody our own worst tendencies and traits, because they remind us of what we fear most in ourselves. 

This in turn, as I've pointed out before, explains a great deal of our contemporary politics. The party and president who engineering the family separation policy subsequently invented for themselves a whole conspiracy theory and alternative reality in which Democrats were accused of trafficking children. The president who was friends with Jeffrey Epstein was recast, implausibly, as a crusader bent on rescuing children from the hands of sexual predators. When we cannot face the truth in ourselves, in short, we look to turn it around and project the feared knowledge directly back onto our enemies. 

As Richard Hofstadter once wrote: "It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him." What Hemingway said of Gertrude Stein is what he really thinks to be true of himself. What the Trumpists and the MAGA-ites say of Democrats is what they dread they will discover of themselves, if ever they allow themselves, even for an instant, to peer into their own hearts.