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 desolationlivingroom: Bumetead lived inrMount Lebanon, Pennsylvania Hemmingway‘came-from-Oak Park, Illinois: Bumstead always wore Army fatigues,-. whenrhe was a teenager - Hemmingway-wentito Italy; France and ‘Spain. Bumstead ‘stayed: home to have five kids :named: Olmstead : When Henmingway went up to his Midwesterniroam: he was: innpainn And we heard he had ‘lost :his. life around him: WhenrBumstead ‘lost :his:wifé-during her lifé- I heard he was=in«ipain~toos So he went:.downm into his basement‘. Like shit Arthur-with all. those paperbacks stuffed‘ in-those pockets s And away from her boudoir mirror of anotherrman: Did-the same thing withia 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 local man, Bumstead, with Ernest Hemingway through patterned comparison: Bumstead 'lived in Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania,' Hemingway '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 - both men 'lost' their lives 'around' them, both went 'down into the basement,' both ended it 'with a shotgun' - framed by the premise that 'the soul of modern man needs money for equipment.' It closes on an unresolved query: 'I wonder if the words quite and edge / Might not make them right.'

The poem's method is comparison as elegy: by lining a famous suicide up beside an obscure one, it argues that the same masculine trap operates 'from different tax brackets,' as the Francis Macomber wife of 'The Short Happy Life' tugs at both men's imaginations. The 'baggy beer pants of a go-getter' and the 'boudoir mirror of another man' mark the cuckolding and the economic pressure that the speaker treats as one wound. Crucially the ending refuses moral verdict, hovering instead on whether 'quite' (quiet) and 'edge' could 'make them right' - leaving suicide poised between failure and a terrible correctness. OCR run-together spacing ('WhenrBumstead', 'Henmingway-wentito') pervades the text; I preserve the source forms and read the imagery conservatively, but the parallel-lives architecture is fully legible.