This style suggests a convenient stance from which Hemingway could write for Oak Park—if not for its churches, then for its literary clubs and English teachers—about characters and scenes he had witnessed in Chicago—if not in the bars on Wabash Avenue and Kid Howard’s boxing ring, then in the pages of the Chicago Tribune and the ring he set up in his mother’s music room.6
The stock characters are all there, from the tough detective with his contempt for squealers to the hired gun with a fatal weakness for Italian opera. The latter, Hand-of-God Evans from “The Ash Heels Tendon” is a revealing figure: he is a cold-eyed killer whose sobriquet, Hand-of-God, italicizes an indifferent and inevitable fate—pure “Chicago”—but his flaw testifies not only to the cliché of the Italian sentiment for Caruso but also to Hemingway’s dutiful attendance at the Chicago Opera, for which his mother provided season tickets.
Hemingway did not invent this style; however much it suited his situation, he found it ready-to-wear in his reading of Ring Lardner and Rudyard Kipling, as critics from Charles Fenton to Michael Reynolds have shown. Nor was it a postwar style. Hemingway had adopted it in his school stories like “A Matter of Colour”; and as a reporter for his school paper he was by-lined as Ring Lardner Junior. In his senior year he wrote a story that predicted some of these postwar Chicago fictions. Drawn from an address to the Hanna Club by A. F. Hammesfahr (December 1916), this tale, narrated by “Ham,” tells of a regiment massacred by Philippine natives after the soldiers had been warned by the older veterans; it ends with a bloody vengeance wreaked on the natives by the commanding officer, now in Leavenworth (item 859). A grisly legend with a familiar Hanna Club moral, “Listen to your elders,” it predicts Hemingway’s use of a narrator in the role of the privileged reporter retelling the tale of an old hand.
There are seven of these Chicago sketches and stories. The first is a story written on Giuseppe Verdi stationery in early January 1919. “The galleria in Milan . . .” (item 416) is a framed narrative of a poker game with a deck of six kings and six aces in which the narrator, with two of each, folds early as the stakes rise between two players who hold the rest. It has Lardner’s language, an O. Henry switch, and something of Kipling;7 and with its younger narrator of the frame insisting on hearing one story and being told another, it also draws on Mark Twain’s “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Like “The Mercenaries” it begins with a triplet of dropped place-names with a Prohibition joke: “The galleria in Milan is a combination of the Rue de 1a Paix, Fifth Avenue, and South State Street before the reformation—not Martin Luther’s but Martin Burney’s. In it you can get anything from the best hors d’oeuvres in Europe to a bronze bust of President Wilson.”
The second is a fragment of a longer sketch written in April 1919, “The lights of the line . . .” (item 550). A brief dialogue among some officers celebrating Christmas as they ride in a carriage outside La Scala, it might be passed over were it not for its nervous wit: “Be comfortable . . . old cock. . . . In the language of the pale-face, ‘heap big war in Europe over.’ You fought to make the world safe for democrats,” and so on. There is also an early indication of Hemingway’s predilection for a British dialect, one that infected even Frederic Henry’s speech ten years later,8 but it is the strained jesting in this passage that will assume more meaning later.
The three central manuscripts of the Chicago group are “The Woppian Way,” “The Mercenaries,” and “The Ash Heels Tendon,” the first begun in the summer of 1919 and, like the other two, completed in the fall or early winter. “The Woppian Way,” or “The Passing of Pickles McCarty,” begins with the narrator-reporter’s recollections of Pickles as “a ham-and-egger, pork-and-beaner . . . in short a bum box-fighter,” good enough only for preliminaries (item 843), and joins it with Pickles’ own story of finding his true main bout on the Austro-Italian front with the Arditi. He is met as he is about to join D’Annunzio’s “band of irregulars” attempting to free the besieged city of Fiume in the fall of 1919,9 and he treats the reporter to a bloody account of an Arditi attack on Asalone. In “The Mercenaries” Rinaldi Rinaldo similarly tells of listening to a tale told by Perry Graves of an amorous night with the wife of an Italian war hero that ends with a point-blank duel with the husband the morning after. The story takes a plot from Byron’s Don Juan and ends it with a Western shoot-out. “The Ash Heels Tendon,” the only one of the three without a second narrator, ends with the last gunfight between Jack Farrel and Hand-of-God Evans; the tough detective knows the killer’s fatal flaw—play Leoncavallo and any true son of Italy will take his hands from his guns to applaud.
Two features of these stories are remarkable. First, two of them use a narrator reporting another’s first-person narrative, a strategy for distancing the reporter from the story in order both to make the tacit claim of objectivity and to assume an immunity to questions of the story’s truth. It is no coincidence, of course, that both of these inside narratives are versions of anecdotes Hemingway had passed off on Chink Dorman-Smith. The first is that he had been the victim of an Italian woman’s sexual voracity and never made it to Taormina, where his days and nights with Jim Gamble were somewhat more delicate; the other is that he had been “wounded leading Arditi troops on Mount Grappa.”10 Each story then is simultaneously a claim and a disclaimer for the veracity of the war stories Hemingway collected, like battlefield souvenirs, after his own brief and accidental engagement in the conflict.
The second feature to note here is that two of the narratives depend upon something of a joke, an ironic twist, or a clever trick for their resolutions. Certainly Hemingway had this device at hand in the fiction of Ring Lardner and O. Henry, and his choice of the strategy may signify nothing more than a young writer’s desperation to publish in the narrative ways that seem to work. But, when this device recurs in the Italian stories and sketches, it assumes a significance beyond the explanation of ordinary literary influence.
The list of manuscripts in the Chicago style ends in an anticlimax of the sentimental and dubious in 1921. “The Current” mixes pugilistic gore with popular romance: Stuyvesant Byng, a wealthy and philandering sportsman, must convince his beloved, Dorothy Hadley, that he is worthy of her love by becoming not just a runner-up but a champion in some sport. Since she would not accept fly-fishing and “there won’t be any polo to speak of for a year,”11 he trains for and wins the middleweight boxing title and, of course, Dorothy. Although he is inspired by the steady current of his love, he wins with a trick, staggering with his gloves down after a long count and then decking his apish opponent.12 The last, to which Griffin has given the title “Portrait of the Idealist in Love,” needs only a note to relieve it of the heavy burden of biography it has been made to bear. There is enough evidence in the typescript (item 270 A) to argue that, although the brief introduction and conclusion are Hemingway’s, the long, maudlin, and lofty vacuities of the idealist’s letter are not Hemingway’s but were hastily copied and framed as a private joke and then set aside.13
Although there are fewer Italian manuscripts—two stories and two sketches—they have about them an aura from the backlighting of A Farewell to Arms and the later war stories; in that light we may risk seeing more than was there at first, but it is a risk worth taking for the serious reading of these early works.
The first sketch, “Nick lay in bed . . .” (item 604), was written soon after the Armistice in November 1918. The narrator describes Nick Grainger lying wounded in a hospital and talking with a nurse. As they listen to the sounds of the Armistice celebration, Nick is reminded of Halloween, and the nurse wonders what it is like now on Broadway. When Nick asks if she is a New Yorker, she admits she is from Fort Wayne; then he, too, confesses to the cosmopolitan strategy: “Sure, I’ve used that stuff too.” That bit of confessional dialogue in which the Midwesterners agree to shed their pretensions looks ahead to the early conversations between Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley.14
When she leaves with a parting smile, Nick t
akes two objects from his bedside table: a bottle of bichloride of mercury, which he hides when the nurse returns, and his war medal with its citation, which he reads to himself. Each of them, the bichloride and the citation, is a deadly antiseptic. That he hides the bichloride suggests an impulse to suicide, but it could heal his physical wounds. So, too, the citation was meant as a sort of rhetorical curative for a wound that brought him close, but not to some ultimate glory.15 At the sketch’s end Nick folds the citation and thinks to himself, “that counterfeit dollar represents my legs and that tin cross is my left arm. ‘I had a rendezvous with Death’—but Death broke the date and now it is all over. God double-crossed me.” That counterfeit dollar, the citation, is later inflated to a “ten thousand lira note” when Colonel Cantwell ritually buries his wound and its honors with “merde, money, and blood” in Across the River and Into the Trees.16
But Nick’s embittered recollection of Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” is more instructive. The poem contrasts the “hushed awakenings” of a night of love with his date with death “at some disputed barricade” and conjoins the pledge to love with one to death: “And I to my pledged word am true / I shall not fail my rendezvous.” I suspect that the poet was more important to Hemingway than his poem. Seeger, Harvard class of 1910, resident of Greenwich Village and Paris, and a true mercenary with the Foreign Legion, wrote his famous poem and died in France when Hemingway was trying out for the junior varsity. The poet not only predicted and kept his appointment with death, and that heroically, but he also won literary fame with one very remarkable poem. How could he fail to represent the perfected image of the soldier-artist? Hemingway’s quotation of the emblematic line with his own ironic tag, “Death broke the date,” is more than a deflation of romantic rhetoric; it is a tacit admission of patriotic shame for not having given the last full measure, of whatever.
Somewhere, I suspect, there is a connection between this moment in the sketch and Hemingway’s celebration of McCarty’s suicidal attack with the Arditi, Perry Graves’s swaggering into a duel, and even Stuyvesant Byng’s bloody bout for love. A romantic and unfulfilled death wish pervades these early manuscripts. The wounded Nick never drinks the healing poison hidden in his bed, but the shame at having been stood up by death lingers on, however muted, in the embarrassment later characters, like Frederic Henry, feel at serving on a “picturesque front.”17 There is a resonant meaning in the change of tenses from “I have” to “I had a rendezvous with Death”; and the mocking tag suggests a common but serious note of the romantic, perhaps a little less than “half in love with easeful Death,” blaming it all on a double-crossing destiny.
Sometime in the winter of 1919–1920, Hemingway drew again on the device of the ironic twist for the war story “The Visiting Team” (items 670 A, B). In this tale an adolescent jest turns deadly, and the picturesque front is shattered into realism.l8 The story begins with a denial of the plot Hemingway may have had in mind for his earlier sketch, “Nick lay in bed . . .”: “Red Smith lay on a cot, no go on, this is no hospital story. There is no soft-eyed, gentle-voiced nurse, who might have stepped out of the Winter Garden chorus, no romantic young Second Lieutenant romantically wounded through the shoulder. There is not even a Captain with a Croix de Guerre pinned to his pillow, both eyes bandaged while his gruff but tender-hearted Irish orderly—but back to Red who lay on a cot.”
There is none of that here, but Hemingway would draw on these stereotypes a decade later. To go on, Red Smith’s perceptions inform the story; he gazes at the barrage balloons over the Austrian lines and imagines the mountain ranges as the magnified edges of razor blades while his friend Tommy sees them as “something out of the Follies”; but together they devise a practical joke for the arrival of some new recruits—from Harvard, of course. When they arrive, these veterans of a picturesque front tell the newcomers of nightly bombardments, mustard gas, and shell shock. During the night they imitate it all with pistol shots, burst light bulbs, and chloride of lime, and then the joke explodes in their hands with a real attack. Red is called out to drive an ambulance, is wounded, and is brought back to die. His death mingles predictions of A Farewell to Arms (“only the good die young”), echoes of Kipling (“and so passed wonderingly a gentleman unafraid”), and a recognition of the fatal boyishness implied in the title, “The Visiting Team.”19 The story ends with a question: having overheard the American’s sporting term for the Austrians, an Italian surgeon, covered with the blood of the ironic prankster, asks “Who are these Viseeting Teem?” The answer the story demands is: they are the enemy, they mean to kill you, and nothing from the playing fields of Eton or Oak Park can change that.20
The last of the Italian stories is one of the most extraordinary of Hemingway’s early manuscripts. An untitled typescript, “He had known he wouldn’t get up . . .”(item 445) is a sampler of his various styles from his school fiction to the chapters of In Our Time. It begins with an exhausted British soldier named Orpen defending a bridge against attacking German troops. As he lies in the weeds, a “German cyclist rode slowly onto the bridge. He crossed and then dismounted. He stood uneasily and looked around. A rifle tapped just once. [The] man fell and crawled and flopped about grotesquely like a spider with a leg torn off. He reached the parapet of the bridge, tried to pull himself up with his hands and then slipped to the ground. The front wheel of his bicycle was still turning. The man was dead before it stopped turning.” This is close to the perception of ironic incongruity that informs the chapters of In Our Time; but not close enough, for Hemingway has yet to discover that that perception will do and that he need not go on, as he does, with “A life was gone. The machine went on. You pressed a trigger. Someone died.”
As the Germans advance, Orpen hears gunfire; a “machine-gun went tac-tac-tac like a typewriter,” and the image recalls another he used in 1921 in “Mitrailliatrice”:
Ugly short infantry of the mind
Advancing over difficult terrain,
Make this Corona Their mitrailleuse.21
Although Orpen is no writer, the analogy between warfare and the creation of art might well occur to him, for he is a pianist and composer. When he imagines machine-gun drill, he thinks, “Remove the clips! Insert the pans! Keep mind on business at hand! On the other hand—left hand or right hand? Left hand, bass. Right hand, treble. Fingers to skip over keys.” With this the narrative introduces its second motif: the artist as soldier, the creator as killer, the young celebrant of life mired in death—a common theme in the poetry of World War I.
The reverie of Orpen’s early career as a talented composer is broken when he is buried in a shell-burst. Imagining that he is still defending the bridge, he hears the opening cello chords of the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh, and the final element of this already surprising narrative is introduced. He finds himself translated into Valhalla where a score of heroes of history and legend play at the game of war. He is welcomed, appropriately, by Horatius and introduced to everyone from Eric the Red and Tamerlane to Davey Crockett and Custer. After Lord Nelson explains the rules of the game and they resume play, Hemingway’s imagination runs amok until Orpen, now in the spirit of things, runs his bayonet into General George Washington’s groin, and the Father of Our Country exclaims, “Oh, good thrust, . . . I forgot you were British.”22 Orpen then wanders off to a peaceful setting very much like home and meets his mother, who tells him he is a hero for defending the bridge and has entered Heaven. Then he comes to, of course, and finds himself being attended by a surgeon taking shrapnel from his chest and a comforting nurse reassuring him that he does not have to return to Valhalla—or even Heaven.
However ill-conceived and typical of his exuberant school fictions this story may be, the bittersweet image of the soldier-artist who endures a heroic death and still lives on to create and that more promising image of the dead cyclist and the still turning bicycle wheel both call for our serious attention.
The two Michigan manuscripts,
“Cross Roads: An Anthology” (items 347, 348) and the earliest version of “Up in Michigan” (item 800), offer a certain symmetry to Hemingway’s Chicago years, standing like parentheses around most of his writing of this time. “Cross Roads” was begun in the fall of 1919 (preceded only by the early Italian sketches and a version of “The Woppian Way”); the first version of “Up in Michigan” was hastily typed in the fall of 1921 in anticipation of the move to Paris with Sherwood Anderson’s letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein hanging over him. Together these manuscripts mark with their style and subjects Hemingway’s first tentative exploration of what was to become his only native literary territory.
In the fall of 1919 he very deliberately set out, with the uneven collaboration of his friend William Smith, to imitate the sketches of E. W. Howe’s “An Anthology of Another Town” appearing in the Saturday Evening Post. But once burnt with rejections, he dropped the project for two years and picked at the worn fringes of tough and delicate sentimentality in stories like “The Ash Heels Tendon” and “The Current.” Either Hemingway wrote better than he knew in the “Cross Roads” sketches, or knowing how well he could write, but with his eye still on the main chance of publishing, he set them aside. The sentimental notion that Hemingway was driven weeping to Walloon and to the discovery of his style by the soul-searing knowledge that Agnes von Kurowsky had jilted him ignores the facts of the matter.23
New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Page 20