The labyrinthine structure of what is perhaps Hemingway’s least-anthologized novella, “The Handle,” belies its peremptory dismissal by many critics as a hastily written jumble of vacuous dialogue wrapped around a poorly-contrived plot. “The Handle,” a posthumously published novella that Hemingway penned in the frustrated years following his Nobel prize in literature for “The Old Man and the Sea,” is the story of a farmer, set in a sleepy fictional province of rural Ohio, whose yearnings for a more transitory lifestyle are offset by a feeling of obligation to the land and the house and the profession of his father, his grandfather, and great-grandfather before him.
Although the fields of Joseph Mallort are now little more than barren clumps of rock, tilled for generations until, as Hemingway writes, “the ground finally refused to yield,” the farmer continues to plow his dusty, heat-cracked fields, hoping against hope to eek what little sustenance they might still provide. Although one may be tempted to draw the conclusion that Hemingway’s barren fields are little more than a thinly-veiled expression of rising self-doubt about the author’s own creative abilities that becomes prevalent in Hemingway’s later years, to dismiss the story as nothing more than a straightforeward allegory is to do an injustice to its more intriguing thematic elements.
Joeseph Mallort is a widower, living alone in the creaky old farmhouse of his father, who awakens in the predawn hours to milk the cows and get the plowing underway before the murderous sun beats down on him. By most afternoons he has succumbed to something that might be diagnosed as mild heat-stroke today, and wanders the fields aimless and slightly confused, murmuring one-sided conversations with his deceased wife, father, gandfather, and the original settler of the farm. Although the dialogue of “The Handle,” represents a tenuous structural departure in that all of the secondary characters are either dead ghosts or mild halucinations, it is still chock full of the brisk versimilitude rendered in simple prose that is the hallmark of Heminway’s finest passages.
After a blight of cow-fever leaves Joseph without the chores of milking and feeding, he digs a mass grave for the cows and buries them under a mound of earth. Several days later, he’s walking the perimeter of his fields, mending the barbed-wire fence, when the ghost of his grandfather begins to taunt him for wasting his time on the fence when all the cows are dead. “You are not mine,” the apparition bellows at one point. “Too lazy to do what needs to be done, too thick to see what no longer needs doing.” Joseph is shaken by the encounter, though more by the ghost’s disapproval than by the fact that he’s seen a ghost. That very night he feels his deceased wife’s hand stroking his hair while the breeze whisper’s a conversation she often repeated in their early years of marriage — that he might sell the farm and resettle in a more bustling place.
The novella’s narration slips at this point into the farmer’s own ranting delerium — possibly fever-induced. This is an unusual structural move for Hemingway, and generally considered by critics to be an unsuccessful one. The incoherence of the novella’s middle passages, wherein events imagined, long past, rembered, forgotten and halucinated all conmingle in a cauldron of stream-of-consciousness writing, is starkly contrasted with the final two chapters, which some suspect may have been written at a later date.
The farmer continues his daily futile ritual of tilling the dusty, heat-cracked fields, more and more out of obligation to the ghost of his grandfather (who spurs him on with greater and greater vehemence in speeches about duty, as though gumption were a cure-all and the barren soil a failure of Joeseph’s faith). One scalding noon, while tilling the South field, a sinkhole opens up under the farmer’s feet, upending his tractor and flinging him off. Sliding down the escarpment, he becomes trapped in the mouth of the sinkhole, his lower torso crushed by the porous limestone, his legs pricking down into the vein of a limestone cavern. As the farmer loses water and blood and the sun beats down harder, he becomes mad with thirst. The soil slowly slides down the conical bank of the sinkhole, enveloping him and making it hard to breath. The more he struggles, the quicker the soil moves. He spies a nearby rock and asks his grandfather to deliver a blow to his head. The story ends with the farmer feeling a faint tug on his feet, and a quick, welcome release from his predicament of slow asphyxiation.
While the story is a relatively marginal one in the greater arena of Hemingway’s collected works, it is significant for two reasons: the obvious parallel between the story’s themes and Hemingway’s own internal struggles of the time cannot be overstated, and the death of the farmer provides us with a glimpse into how Hemingway may have perceived his own decision to commit suicide three years later.
