THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF FRANCIS MACOMBER
by Ernest Hemingway, 1936

No story by Ernest Hemingway is more famous than "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." Popular with general readers, it has also attracted an enormous amount of scholarly attention and debate. Long aware of the basis of the story in Hemingway's first African safari, scholars have over the years identified numerous literary parallels and influences that range form Stephen Crane and Lev Tolstoi to Captain Marryat. The debate began in the 1960s when the traditional reading of Margot Macomber as the archetypal bitch of American fiction became suspect. Had she really intended to end the life of Francis Macomber after he discovered his manhood?

The story is in many ways atypical for Hemingway. Few of his short stories emphasize physical action to the extent found in the Macomber story. Hemingway usually portrays his protagonists confronting themselves privately, though the context may be physical action such as war (numerous Nick stories) or crime ("The Killers"). "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Hemingway's other African story, is closer to the norm of private, inner conflicts. A story with important analogues to Tolstoi's "The Death of Ivan Ilych," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" may also be seen as a companion story to "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," which he had just finished. The two stories answer the bad reviews he had received for Green Hills of Africa, the nonfictional account of his African safari. Although Hemingway continued to write short stories almost until the end of his life, he completed his major contribution to the genre with the African stories.

In highlighting the name of its protagonist, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is unique among Hemingway's short stories. Not only does the full name rest boldly in the title, but Hemingway also frequently uses his name throughout the story. His first name becomes a telling part of the uncomfortable fact of Macomber's indecisive manhood. By calling him "Francis, my pearl," his wife charges that he is lily-livered.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, with the hidden first name Francis, was on Hemingway's mind when he worked on both African stories. (In the magazine version of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" he had angered Fitzgerald by referring directly to "Scott" and the very rich.) In both African stories, written during the middle of the Great Depression, Hemingway took the very rich, which was Fitzgerald's terrain, as his subject. He was also haunted by Fitzgerald's article in Esquire about his "crack-up." Fitzgerald's manhood was always a worry to Hemingway, but in the African stories he also seemed intent on warding off his own crack-up.

There is little mystery about Francis Macomber's character. Born to money and good looks, he is an idle dabbler. He has not had to forge an identity, for the inherited Macomber name and wealth have been sufficient. Now in midlife, he is married to a beautiful woman, Margot. Together they seek adventure on an African safari, Macomber subconsciously eager to realize his manhood or to satisfy his wife's doubts about it. He certainly seeks the symbols of such manhood. Although he bolts when the lion he has wounded charges, in the next day's hunt he discovers that fear of death need not control him. He proves the point by not bolting when the wounded buffalo charges. And whatever Margot's motivation when she shoots Macomber, he is transformed or, with safari leader Robert Wilson's concurrence, thinks that he is, which may be the same thing. Macomber's death means, of course, that there will be no long-term testing of his manhood. This makes his death "fortunate," for if his bravery is only an illusion, he keeps it intact.

As he worked on "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," Hemingway considered 26 titles, an exceptionally large number. The majority of the titles referred to marriage, portraying it as an enormous and deadly power struggle. In the past criticism has given great attention to this dimension of the story, often inviting readers to see Margot Macomber more sympathetically, to see her as much of a victim as Francis is. Given their sense of Hemingway's bias against women, some readers do not find this an easy step. For them Margot is proof that the female is the most deadly of the species. Indeed, Margot has many lines that challenge the assumptions and authority of the males—and some of her own actions as well. After all she was eager for the safari and, in fact, seems to have instigated it. But from the start she questions its meaning. She tells Wilson that he was "lovely" as he killed the lion: "That is if blowing things' heads off is lovely." (Her qualification is a grim foreshadowing of the story's ending.) She questions a good deal more before the story's end, including the ethics of the chase and the meaning of Francis's transformation. The latter is something she first desires but then fears. Although Wilson turns harshly against Margot after she shoots Francis, his earlier thinking demonstrates a good deal of sympathy for her. He senses her complexity. "What's in her heart, God knows," he thinks, a line that should caution readers that Wilson does not know.

As readers have been more willing to consider Margot with sympathy—seeing her as victim of her class, her culture, and ineffectual males—they have tended to turn against Wilson. He has been charged with sexism, racism, and opportunism, reversing earlier readings that made him the admired tutor to Francis the tyro. His anger with Margot at the story's end may say more about Wilson and his inadequacies than it does about Margot and hers. Wilson's greatest moment of exaltation corresponds with Macomber's. He marks it by quoting the lines of another Francis (Shakespeare's Feeble), "By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death and let it go which way it will he that dies this year is quit for the next." But the sentiment provides Wilson with no consolation after Macomber lies dead before him.

In fact, none of the characters of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is without flaw. No character shows much understanding of self, although Macomber moves in that direction, and Margot's "accidental" killing of Francis may reflect the complexity of her own transformation. Arguably, Wilson's anger is displaced anger against himself, a reflection of his miscalculations. In narrating the Macomber safari, Hemingway uses multiple centers of consciousness—although it is significant that Margot's is not included—that emphasize the inadequacies of any single viewpoint and the flaws of each member of his triangle. By taking readers briefly into the consciousness of the wounded lion, he underscores the importance of the multiple perspectives to his tale. Thus, readers who sense Margot's better side trust the omniscient narrator on a crucial issue when he reports that she "shot at the buffalo" as it "seemed about to gore Macomber." Her weapon is a Mannlicher, an ironic touch that still persuades some readers of an intention different from that stated in the narrative. Hemingway's tale teems with ironies and paradoxes, however. A story that once seemed among his simplest actually ranks among his most complex.

—Joseph M. Flora