2016 Volume 2016 Issue 26 Pages 132-141
Ernest Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain” has its characters communicating in English and Italian. Yet, when closely checked, the exchange is conducted more in Italian and less in English than in the published version. Moreover, some obviously irregular expressions in Italian intrigue one to assume that the American woman’s limited proficiency in Italian plays a substantial part in the story. This viewpoint promotes, as the import of the story, the wife’s struggle and gnawing sense of insecurity trapped between her husband’s indifference and her poor rapport with the hotel people, while on their seemingly little planned travel which does not promise a settled and fulfilling life she longs for.
Overlapping this imagery, there looms up Giorgio de Chirico’s “Mystery and Melancholy of a Street,” the enigmatic painting of 1914. The motif of a cat sighted, not retrieved but replaced with a different one contains an inevitably loose yet convincing similarity to that of the shadow of the old man/statue-monument in the solidly structured visual confusion of the painting. One might be intrigued to imagine a more substantial and long-range artistic sympathy between Hemingway and de Chirico, who supposedly shared time and space in the modernistic European art scene of the first half of the twentieth century. Paul Cezanne is a well-established influence on Hemingway, a fact which should none the less encourage a search into that of Giorgio de Chirico.
