Geniuses Together : American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (9780571309412)

by Carpenter, Humphrey

  Some of the other ‘chapters’ of in our time seem to be concerned to explore the territory that divides journalism from literature:

  They hanged Sam Cardinella at six o’clock in the morning in the corridor of the county jail. The corridor was high and narrow with tiers of cells on either side. All the cells were occupied. The prisoners had been brought in for the hanging. Five men sentenced to be hanged were in the five top cells. Three of the men to be hanged were negroes. They were very frightened …

  When they came towards him with the cap to go over his head Sam Cardinella lost control of his sphincter muscle. The guards who had been holding him up dropped him. They were both disgusted …

  Here the narrator seems to be a journalist covering the story for his paper, but the difference between in our time and real journalism is shown by the actual newspaper account in the New York Times from which Hemingway took the material for another ‘chapter’, about the execution of Greek cabinet ministers. The newspaper version opens as follows:

  To begin the horrors of the morning it was discovered by the guards that one of the five had died in the van on the way out from heart failure.

  On the arrival of the van, Gounaris was lifted out on a stretcher to stand up and face a firing party. It was then found that this wretched man, who, after all, had been a figure in the recent history of Europe, was unable to stand at all …

  This is Hemingway’s version in in our time, in its entirety:

  They shot the six cabinet ministers at half past six in the morning against the wall of the hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.

  A superficial reading of these two accounts might suggest that Hemingway was the eyewitness; the New York Times reporter indulges in expressions of emotion which seem contrived and histrionic. However, the newspaper report gives the plain facts, while in contrast Hemingway – as in ‘Indian Camp’ and the account of the shooting at the barricade – is averting his eyes from what is really happening. The rainwater, the puddles, and the ‘wet dead leaves’ are substitutes for the blood that is about to be shed, the hospital with its shutters nailed shut anticipates the lifeless corpses or perhaps the coffins that are to receive them, and the account stops abruptly just as the first real death is about to happen – Hemingway has cut out the detail of the man who was already dead, as this would have spoilt the effect of these substitutions for death and bloodshed. Similarly in the account of the hanging, the height and narrowness of the prison corridor suggests the gallows and the drop, which are themselves scarcely mentioned, while the climax is not the execution but the prisoner defecating in his trousers – reverting to childhood, even babyhood, for he ‘lost control of his sphincter muscle’ like a child not yet properly toilet-trained. The in our time ‘chapters’ are, then, exercises in the ‘iceberg’ principle, experiments in describing horror and brutality by keeping the real subject matter submerged.

  *

  Hemingway told a friend that Ezra Pound has said in our time was the best piece of prose he had read in forty years. The book’s technique was a prose version of Imagism – described by William Carlos Williams as ‘no ideas but in things’. The Imagists, too, had omitted anything that could be judged superfluous. Yet Harold Loeb wondered if Hemingway’s preference for this style of writing was due less to literary fashion than to his own character. Loeb doubted if he was really able to immerse himself fully in any experience, whether he was not pathologically suited to being the uninvolved observer of other people’s troubles.

  Edmund Wilson, reviewing Three Stories and Ten Poems and in our time in the Dial in October 1924, judged the poems unimportant but called the prose ‘of the first distinction.’ He said Hemingway was the only American writer apart from Sherwood Anderson who had ‘felt the genius of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives’. The characteristic of this Stein–Anderson–Hemingway school, said Wilson, was ‘a naïveté of language often passing into the colloquialism of the character dealt with’, but despite its flatness of time it could convey ‘profound emotion and complex states of mind’. Wilson also observed that it was not just that these three writers were successful in the traditional style of English prose: ‘It is a distinctively American development.’

  *

  By midsummer 1924 the transatlantic review had, as Stella Bowen puts it, ‘absorbed’ all Quinn’s backing and her and Ford’s own cash. Ford went off to New York in the faint hope of extracting some more dollars from Quinn, and left Hemingway in charge of the magazine while he was away, blandly informing his readers in a pre-departure editorial that his deputy’s tastes ‘march more with our own than those of most other men’.

  This seemed almost an invitation to misbehaviour, and as soon as Ford had gone, Hemingway assembled an issue (dated August 1924) calculated to annoy him. He threw out the serialisation of Ford’s own Some Do Not (the first part of Parade’s End), and dropped Ford’s Daniel Chaucer critical dicta, in order to make way for contributions by Bryher, Dorothy Richardson, Nathan Asch, John Dos Passos, and William Carlos Williams. Ford got back to Paris just before the issue went to press, and squeezed in a sarcastic editorial observing that ‘Mr Ernest Hemingway, the admirable Young American prose writer’, had saddled the magazine with ‘an unusually large sample of the work of that Young America whose claims we have so insistently – but not with such efficiency – forced upon our readers’. He reassured them that ‘with its next number the Review will re-assume its international aspect’.

  Hemingway had been paid nothing for the editorial work, and Hadley’s income had dropped drastically, thanks to unwise investments. He badly wanted to spend some time in Spain – he and Hadley managed it in July 1924 with Bill Bird and McAlmon – but they were running out of cash, and the transatlantic review left Hemingway with little time for his own work. He told Pound that acting as editor in Ford’s stead had ‘killed my chances of having a book published this fall and by next spring some son of a bitch will have copied everything I’ve written and they will simply call me another of his imitators. Now we haven’t got any money anymore I am going to have to quit writing and I never will have a book published. I feel cheerful as hell.’

  The transatlantic review struggled on for a few months more, but Quinn died of cancer soon after Ford got back from New York (he had been too ill to talk business while Ford was there), and Ford wasted a good deal of effort and money trying to raise backing elsewhere; Hemingway describes him spending ‘100s of francs on taxis trying to get 500 francs out of Natalie Barney’. It was Hemingway himself who lifted the magazine temporarily out of its difficulties by persuading a Chicago acquaintance who had married an heiress to put up a substantial sum. (Hemingway was obliged meanwhile to borrow 100 francs each from Pound and McAlmon to survive.) By the end of the year the magazine’s new cash had all been spent, and the issue dated January 1925 was the last. Ford had been persuaded to include another batch of work by young expatriates, so he sneeringly entitled it a ‘children’s number’.

  Hemingway was at least managing to write much faster now; in August he told Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas – who had agreed to be godparents to the Hemingway baby, christened John but nicknamed Bumby – that he had finished two long short stories. One of them, ‘Big Two-Hearted River’, covered 100 pages of manuscript, ‘and nothing happens and the country is swell, I made it all up, so I see it all and part of it comes out the way it ought to … but isn’t writing a hard job though. It used to be easy before I met you. Certainly was bad, Gosh, I’m awfully bad now, but it’
s a different kind of bad.’

  In October, writing to thank Edmund Wilson for his piece in the Dial, he said he had ‘worked like hell’ and had produced ‘a book of 14 stories with a chapter of In Our Time between each story – that is the way they were meant to go – to give the picture of the whole before examining it in detail’. The book had been sent to a friend in the USA who hoped to find a publisher.

  Whatever he might say in justification of the scheme, the ‘chapters’ of in our time fitted rather awkwardly between the short stories he had written for the new book. They seemed to have been reduced to the status of a decorative border, and have little or nothing to do with the short stories, several of which were about the boyhood and adolescence of Nick Adams. In Our Time, as the new collection was to be called, was therefore a less tightly constructed book than in our time. Nor were all the new stories entirely successful. ‘The End of Something’ and ‘Three Day Blow’ skilfully described Nick Adams’s skill at fishing or his drunken evening with his friend Bill, but became mawkish when they tried to deal with the break-up of a love affair:

  All he knew was that he had once had Marjorie and that he had lost her. She was gone and he had sent her away. That was all that mattered. He might never see her again. Probably he never would. It was all gone, finished.

  Another piece, ‘A Very Short Story’, was an idealised account of Hemingway’s wartime affair with the nurse Agnes in the Milan hospital: ‘She was cool and fresh from the night … There were only a few patients, and they all knew about it … As he walked back along the halls he thought of [her] in his bed.’

  But these defects were hugely outweighed by the good things in the book. Hemingway could now sustain the tight, narrative style of the in our time ‘chapters’ through full-length short stories – though they were often not ‘stories’ in the conventional sense. For example, ‘The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife’ simply portrays its author’s irascible father as Dr Adams, having a pointless quarrel with Indians who have come to cut up logs for him, and ‘Cross-Country Snow’ presents a few moments from a skiing holiday with a male friend. Both are studies in atmosphere and nuance rather than constructed narratives. Best of all is ‘Big Two-Hearted River’, the story whose completion Hemingway had announced to Gertrude and Alice. This is an account of an entirely eventless fishing and camping holiday; the adult Nick Adams is alone in the Michigan landscape with his own reflections for company:

  Nick was hungry. He did not believe he had ever been hungrier. He opened and emptied a can of pork and beans and a can of spaghetti into the frying-pan.

  ‘I’ve got a right to eat this kind of stuff, if I’m willing to carry it,’ Nick said. His voice sounded strange in the darkening woods. He did not speak again.

  He started a fire with some chunks of pine he got with the axe from a stump. Over the fire he stuck a wire grill, pushing the four legs down into the ground with his boot. Nick put the frying-pan on the grill over flames. He was hungrier. The beans and spaghetti warmed. Nick stirred them and mixed them together. They began to bubble, making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface. There was a good smell. Nick got out a bottle of tomato ketchup and cut four slices of bread. The little bubbles were coming faster now. Nick sat down beside the fire and lifted the frying-pan off. He poured about half the contents out into the tin plate. It spread slowly on the plate. Nick knew it was too hot. He poured on some tomato ketchup. He knew the beans and spaghetti were still too hot. He looked at the fire, then at the tent, he was not going to spoil it all by burning his tongue. For years he had never enjoyed fried bananas because he had never been able to wait for them to cool. His tongue was very sensitive. He was very hungry. Across the river in the swamp, in the almost dark, he saw a mist rising. He looked at the tent once more. All right. He took a full spoonful from the plate.

  ‘Chrise,’ Nick said. ‘Geezus Chrise,’ he said happily.

  ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ is a recapitulation of ‘Indian Camp’, except that this time Nick turns his back entirely on the ‘awful mess’ of adult life and retreats into the country of childhood. Deposited by a train in the middle of nowhere, he discovers that the town he had expected to find has been burnt to the ground; the adult world has been wiped out at a stroke. He then sets off on foot to explore a landscape that seems to be his own body: crossing a gentle ridge of hills he looks down on a country that is dotted with ‘islands of dark pine trees’, and in one of these he lies down to rest, looking up contentedly at the erect tree trunks, ‘straight and brown without branches’. He falls asleep, and when he wakes it is almost as if he had been reborn female. Certainly he is now a homemaker:

  His hands smelled good from the sweet fern. He smoothed the blankets. He did not want anything making lumps under the blankets … Already there was something mysterious and homelike … He was in his home where he had made it. Now he was hungry.

  The meal he cooks for himself is the kind of food that children eat, and he suffers from a childlike impatience to begin it before it has properly cooled.

  Having rediscovered the female and childlike sides of his own nature, in the second part of the story he specifically investigates his own sexuality. He goes fishing – presumably in the ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ itself, though the story’s title is never explained; very likely it is the Indian name for Nick’s trout stream, and it seems, with its hint of breasts, to emphasise the female nature of the river. Nick’s actions appear superficially male – impaling grasshoppers on his hook as bait and standing with an erect fishing rod – but again he seems also to take on a female role. Plunging himself into the river, he feels ‘all the old feeling’ as he watches the slippery trout sliding beneath the surface of the water and catches two of them. ‘They were both males,’ he discovers as he slits them open with his knife, ‘long grey-white strips of milt, smooth and clean.’ He reacts to each catch as if it were orgasm: ‘Nick’s hand was shaky … The thrill had been too much. He felt, vaguely, a little sick, as though it would be better to sit down.’ He seems to be in a pre-adult state in which he can come to terms with female as well as male characteristics in himself. At the end, he chooses to remain in this state for the present, rather than to return again to adult male sexuality: ‘He did not feel like going on into the swamp … He did not want to go down the stream any further today.’

  The other outstanding story In Our Time, ‘The Battler’, begins in a manner closely resembling the opening of ‘Big Two-Hearted River’. Again, Nick finds himself by the railroad track in open country, this time having been thrown off a freight train on which he has been riding illicitly. ‘Riding the rods’ like this is a classic action of a ‘tough guy’, but he is not really tough and so has come to grief. Walking along the track, once again a refugee from adult life, he sees a fire with a solitary man beside it. The man comments on Nick’s black eye and dishevelled appearance, and sizes him up in terms of maleness: ‘“You’re a tough one, aren’t you?” “No,” Nick answered.’

  The man himself is a genuine ‘tough one’, an ex-boxer: ‘His face was misshapen … queerly formed and mutilated … Dead looking in the firelight.’ He is the epitome of maleness: ‘Call me Ad,’ he tells Nick – Adam, the archetypal man; hence also Nick’s surname, Adams. He exults in having been tough: ‘“I could take it … Don’t you think I could take it, kid?”’ But he is by his own admission ‘crazy’ – his brains have almost been knocked out in the ring – and consequently he is as childlike as Nick; he has to depend for food and protection on a Negro who acts as his minder. While Nick is eating with him he suffers a sudden fit of meaningless rage and attacks Nick; the Negro carefully knocks him out with a blackjack and thereafter behaves with maternal tenderness: ‘The Negro picked him up, his head hanging, and carried him to the fire … laid him down gently … splashed water with his hand on the man’s face.’ Apologising for his action, the Negro explains to Nick: ‘I didn’t know how well you could take care of yourself …’ Nick, too, has been given mater
nal protection. At the end of the story he returns to the adult world, walking along the track towards a town, having discovered – as if he did not know it already – that ‘toughness’ is a mirage.

  *

  After such magnificent writing it is disappointing to find Hemingway descending, elsewhere in In Our Time, into mediocre social satire. One of the stories, ‘Mr and Mrs Elliott’, describes the ineptitudes of a naïve newly married American couple who have gone abroad:

  Paris was quite disappointing and very rainy. It became increasingly important to them that they should have a baby, and even though someone had pointed out Ezra Pound to them in a café and they had watched James Joyce eating in the Trianon and almost been introduced to a man named Leo Stein, it was to be explained to them who he was later, they decided to go to Dijon …

  Mr Elliott (the name is a silly gibe) becomes a bad poet and Mrs Elliott consoles herself sexually with a girlfriend. Hemingway is crudely mocking the sexual confusions that ‘Indian Camp’ and ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ had explored with such sensitivity.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Elliott’ does show, however, that he was beginning to regard his fellow expatriates in Paris as potential ‘copy’. Up to now he had chiefly affected to despise them as a collection of wastrels. Writing in the Toronto Star in March 1922 he alleged that

  the scum of Greenwich Village, New York, has been skimmed off and deposited in large ladles full on that section of Paris adjacent to the Café Rotonde. It is a strange-acting and strange-looking breed … You can find anything you are looking for … except serious artists … They are nearly all loafers expending the energy that an artist puts into his creative work in talking about what they are going to do.

  Two years later he began to see their value as raw material for fiction.