Bumstead Hemmingway

By Jack Joseph Smith

Before he ever mentioned, that the soul of modern man needs money for equipment, Something in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber's short story wife Must have taken something in Hemmingway for an African ride In the baggy beer pants of a go-getter Bumstead saw the same unacknowledged wasteland Through the pane glass of his desolation livingroom Bumstead lived in Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania Hemmingway came from Oak Park, Illinois: Bumstead always wore Army fatigues, when he was a teenager: Hemmingway went to Italy; France and Spain: Bumstead stayed home to have five kids named Olmstead: When Hemmingway went up to his Midwestern room: he was in pain And we heard he had lost his life around him: When Bumstead lost his wife during her life I heard he was in pain too, So he went down into his basement Like shit Arthur with all those paper backs stuffed in those pockets And away from her boudoir mirror of another man Did the same thing with a shotgun After our guts have fallen through an ending: With our hands on the hemp that makes good rope twist, I wonder if the words quite and edge Might not make them right

Original Scan

Page 89

AI Interpretation

GPT

A parallel biography of a suburban neighbor named Bumstead and Ernest Hemingway, tracing how both men's masculinity, desolation, and violent ends converge despite vastly different scales of fame and geography.

The poem uses the domestic ordinariness of Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania to measure the literary legend of Hemingway, finding the same shotgun at the bottom of both lives.

Claude

A double portrait that braids a Mount Lebanon man, Bumstead, with Ernest Hemingway through patterned comparison: 'Bumstead lived in Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania', 'Hemmingway came from Oak Park, Illinois'; Bumstead 'always wore Army fatigues' as a teenager while 'Hemmingway went to Italy; France and Spain'; Bumstead 'stayed home to have five kids named Olmstead'. The likeness tightens into shared catastrophe. Hemmingway, 'in pain' in 'his Midwestern room', 'had lost his life around him'; Bumstead, who 'lost his wife during her life' to 'her boudoir mirror of another man', 'went down into his basement' and 'Did the same thing with a shotgun'. It closes on a query: 'I wonder if the words quite and edge / Might not make them right'.

The poem's method is comparison as elegy: lining a famous suicide beside an obscure one argues that the same trap operates at every scale, and the opening premise, 'the soul of modern man needs money for equipment', frames masculinity as something bought and outfitted. The Macomber wife of 'The Short Happy Life' hangs over both men as the figure of a marriage that kills, while 'the baggy beer pants of a go-getter' and 'the pane glass of his desolation livingroom' move Hemingway's wasteland into the suburbs. The simile 'Like shit Arthur with all those paper backs / stuffed in those pockets' adds a third, unexplained figure who carries literature like ballast. The ending refuses a verdict, wondering whether 'quite' (read as quiet) and 'edge' could 'make them right', which leaves both deaths poised between failure and a terrible correctness. Source spellings 'Hemmingway' and 'livingroom' are preserved.