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FIREARMS IN THE WORKS OF

HEMINGWAY AND MAILER

BARRY H. LEEDS

BY NOW IT IS MOUTHING A TRUISM TO POINT OUT THAT FIREARMS have played an iconic role in American history. Starting with this axiomatic assumption, one finds that guns are virtually ubiquitous in the works of those two peculiarly American authors, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer. Sometimes mere accoutrements or plot devices, they are more often significant thematically and symbolically.

Occasionally, serendipitous connections between the two authors present themselves. The best example of these may be the case of the 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. At the outset of A Farewell to Arms (1929), Hemingway describes how

the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were

wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the

front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips

of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes

so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they

were six months gone with child. (4)

This crucial passage foreshadows the thematic connection of rain, pregnancy, war and death in the novel, notably that of Catherine Barkley, which makes Farewell so clearly a naturalistic work.

The 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano, standard issue for the Italian army throughout the first half of the twentieth century, was subsequently sold cheaply in large numbersthrough mail-order houses worldwide.One of these rifles, equipped with a 4-power scope, was ordered by Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963, forty-five years after the 1918 setting of Hemingway’s Farewell, and used to assassinate John F. Kennedy, as elaborated upon in Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (1995). This death of monumental, tragic proportions was brought about by the use of a $10 gun. Also in A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry feels faintly ridiculous in obeying the regulation that a uniformed officer be armed with a pistol even when out of combat (148).Yet after his convalescence in Milan he uses his pistol (of unspecified caliber, but described as “regulation”) during the next campaign to shoot one of two sergeants for disobedience and desertion (204). The point of the passage, one of many emphasizing the anti-heroic message of the novel, is that Henry and the enlisted man Bonello (who administers the coup de grâce) are so inured to death in war that they are entirely dispassionate about it.

Most clearly parallel to this scene is the opening of An American Dream (1965) in which Stephen Richards Rojack kills four German machine-gunners with his .30 caliber M1 carbine. Portentously set under a full moon, the episode illustrates Rojack’s capacity for lethal violence and his perception that murder has a sexual aspect to it (Mailer, American 3-6). Yet, in a later passage in the New England woods with his wife Deborah, he is shamed by her superior ability to hunt small animals with a .22 rifle, another of the scenes that illuminates the constant competition in their intense love/hate relationship: “And in fact she was an exceptional hunter. She had gone on safari with her first husband and killed a wounded lion charging ten feet from her throat, she dropped an Alaskan bear with two shots to the heart (30/06 Winchester)” (35).

Moving to the beginning of Mailer’s career, it is obvious that every character in The Naked and the Dead () is issued regulation small arms: the officers with caliber . ACP Model A pistols, the enlisted men with -  M Garand rifles (as distinguished from Rojack’s smaller M carbine) or . Thompson submachine guns. Perhaps the most crucial episode in which one of these weapons figures is late in the book, during the abortive attempt by I & R platoon to climb Mt. Anaka, when Red Valsen rebels against Staff Sgt. Croft’s leadership and is forced to obey at gunpoint: “Croft . . . unslung his rifle, cocked the bolt leisurely. . . . It was worthless to temporize. Croft wanted to shoot him” (–).When Red capitulates, it signals the end of all resistance to Croft, which is emblematic of the allegorical conclusion by Mailer that reactionaries would dominate post-war America and which emphasizes the novel’s pessimistic message, its naturalistic bias

If war is the most obvious arena in which guns figure, it is not hard to find the others: hunting and, in urban civilian life, criminal pursuits. The most striking of the latter occurs in Hemingway’s great story, “The Killers,” and Mailer’s  murder mystery, Tough Guys Don’t Dance. In the former, the two hit men, almost robotic in their mindless, inexorable commitment to a job that must be done, pursue their prey, ex-boxer Ole Anderson, with a chilling, leisurely assurance and sawed-off  gauge shotguns. In the first cinematic version of the story (), a classic film noir with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner in their first starring roles, the killers (one of whom is William Conrad, later of TV“Cannon” fame) use more pedestrian Smith & Wesson Model  . Special revolvers. As in Hemingway’s story, Ole Anderson, in true naturalistic fashion, passively awaits his death.

In Tough Guys Don’t Dance, several of the seven violent deaths are carried out by the three matching . automatic pistols bought by Meeks Wardley Hilby III, including his own suicide and that of his doppelgänger Lonnie Pangborn. These parallels in death echo the sexual parallels in the lives of these characters and the novel presents a sexual nexus in which virtually every character is attached carnally to several others.

In a more significant book, The Executioner’s Song (), the career criminal Gary Gilmore traffics in guns and murders with one. He is inept with the . automatic he uses in his two cold-blooded assassinations, for he shoots himself in the hand after the second murder, and the bleeding wound casts immediate suspicion upon him and leads to his quick capture by the police. This episode is in line with Gary’s failures throughout the book and his entire life.

In Why Are We in Vietnam? (), the metaphorical juxtaposition of over-armed Texans hunting in Alaska, and the parallel depredations of the U.S. Army upon the population of Vietnam is best expressed in the passage where DJ lists at length the battery of guns brought on the hunt, especially by his father, Rusty: