When he wrote “The Killers” in May 1926, Hemingway summed up one of the main points he had been making in the Nick Adams stories: life refuses to play fair. “The Killers” exaggerates the disparity between the map and the territory almost to an absurd extent. The real issue that is at stake, the impending death of Ole, is nearly obscured by a series of arguments and misunderstandings brought about by faulty clocks and menus that fail to tell the whole truth. Yet none of the parts of the story can be separated from the others, for what “The Killers” illustrates is that life does not operate as Nick, and perhaps the reader as well, has been taught. Life sets traps for honest, straightforward people who believe what they hear and what they read. For a time the individual may survive even though he follows the false map, as Ole has survived by running or as Nick has survived by following false and artificial codes of behavior, but in the end, reality must be faced. It is no easy task to confront the truth, which is, as Hemingway was to suggest by the title of his 1933 volume of short stories, that even the winners in life take nothing as a prize. Ole Andreson is a loser, not a winner, and he will soon die no matter what he does. His choice is as limited as the choices offered to the killers in the lunchroom, and Nick’s suggestions about going to the police or running away correspond to the false choices on the menu. Ole’s only real choice is how he will face death when it comes for him. Through his brief comments to Nick, he reveals a world gone mad, a world in which none of the truths passed down by previous generations are of any use, just as in the earlier scene of the story some of man’s most trusted symbols—the printed word and the clock—have been proved false. The verbal world has become completely divorced from the world of experience.
“The Killers” is more self-conscious in its use of symbolism than the previous Nick Adams stories, and its pattern of faulty signs or incorrect maps evolved over a period of time. Examination of the different manuscript versions of “The Killers” shows just how Hemingway’s thematic design evolved as he worked on the story. Three separate states of the story are present in the Hemingway collection at the Kennedy Library: a fragmentary beginning draft, a second draft with an extensive addition appended to it, and a clean carbon of the typescript apparently used as setting copy for the first publication of the story in Scribner’s Magazine.4 Few readers would recognize the genesis of the story in the seven-page fragment, the first page in corrected typescript, and the remainder in holograph. Nick Adams walks down the street in Petoskey, Michigan, stops at the Parker House restaurant, and orders a sandwich from the counter man, George O’Neal, from whom he accepts free shots of whiskey while the two engage in aimless conversation. At that point two men walk in, and the story begins much as in its published form with the killers trying unsuccessfully to order from the menu and noting the incorrect clock. But Hemingway apparently had no clear concept of the ultimate theme of the story, and this fragment ends when Max reaches for the ham and eggs ordered by Al.5
The second manuscript version of the story is undoubtedly the one Hemingway said he wrote, along with “Today is Friday” and “Ten Indians,” in a single day while staying in a Madrid hotel. This manuscript, originally entitled “The Matadors,” begins as the published story does, with two men entering the lunchroom. Petoskey is canceled out, and the setting has been changed to Summit. The story proceeds along the lines of the published story, with the various deliberate discrepancies already noted: Henry’s lunchroom, run by George; the mix-ups over the clock and the menu; and the images of the killers as photographers and a vaudeville team. However, the corrected typescript ends inconclusively with Nick, George, and the cook all displaying their nervousness after the killers have left the lunchroom. A nine-page holograph addition to this version of the story results in its completion. A slug-line at the top of the first page reads “add the Killers,” and the second scene, which takes place at Hirsch’s rooming house, is appended to the lunchroom scene.6 The only significant detail that does not appear in the holograph addition is the confusion about Mrs. Hirsch and Mrs. Bell. This further discrepancy between the verbal world and the extensional world was added only in the third version of the story, the corrected typescript.7 By the time Hemingway was preparing the typescript for the Scribner’s Magazine publication of the story, he had his effect firmly in mind.
Throughout the Nick Adams stories Hemingway had been making the point that Nick was growing up into a world in which the old values that guided his father’s generation no longer applied. In “The Killers” Hemingway restated this thesis, compressing his perception of the changes his generation faced into a symbolic parable: just as menus, clocks, signs, and names mislead the trusting people who accept them and rely upon them, so too the moral and spiritual code passed down from previous generations will prove an inadequate and deceptive guide to Nick’s troubled twentieth-century generation. The old maps no longer correspond to the territory, and the young man of Nick’s generation who is to keep his sanity will have to find a new system of finding his way.
“The Last Good Country”: Again the End of Something
David R. Johnson
As the fragment now appears in The Nick Adams Stories, “The Last Good Country” is over sixty pages in length—just three times that of “Big Two-Hearted River,” otherwise the longest Nick Adams story. Manuscript sheets bear dates of 1952, 1953, and 1954, indicating that in Hemingway’s mind this last story about his first fictional hero was no afternoon’s false start, begun in recollection of other times, other tales. Moreover, the story introduced in these sixty pages indicates that there was another sixty and perhaps considerably more yet to come. Is seems clear that Hemingway was attempting the Michigan novel he had talked about, a portrait of the young Nick Adams at least as long as his immediately preceding success, The Old Man and the Sea. What is now available to readers is a promising beginning. There are slips, occasional bits of dialogue and several scenes where, as Philip Young has commented, Hemingway’s characteristic brinksmanship does not keep him from slipping over into sentimentality,1 but basically the tale reads too well to have been carelessly dropped and certainly well enough to spur speculation about why such a start did not lead to a completed manuscript.
Perhaps in part the reasons Hemingway did not complete “The Last Good Country” are to be found in the impulses that led him back to Nick Adams, impulses strong enough for sixty pages but insufficient to carry him through a novel. Certainly there must have been some feelings of nostalgia involved in the decision to attempt the Michigan novel, returning to his own boyhood and young manhood and at the same time to the world of his first fictional creation, Nick Adams. Of interest here is the work for which he suspended “The Last Good Country.” A Moveable Feast, written concurrently with pieces of “The Last Good Country,” is itself—regardless of what else it may be—a moving and perceptive recollection of the good, early days in Paris. In other words a work of nostalgia. To admit nostalgia as one impulse for Hemingway’s return to Nick, however, is not to suggest it to be sufficient to sustain the job of writing through a substantial portion of a novel. As a collection of autobiographical essays, A Moveable Feast might well have been sustained by the pleasure of evoking with fondness a good life of the past. A work of fiction, presumably, requires stauncher stuff.2 Perhaps adding to whatever nostalgia Hemingway brought to Nick and Michigan’s waters and woods was the recent critical triumph of The Old Man and the Sea: it seems credible that the writer, “knowing all the tricks” and cheered by the success of his latest work, would attempt to repeat it with an old subject, an old theme, extending and perhaps revising the vision he had brought as a younger, fresher, but less wily writer to the earlier Nick Adams stories. If Hemingway could not send Nick off in a fishing skiff with kid sister, Littless, he could pack them both off for an idyllic sojourn in an unspoiled meadow, as cut off from the rest of the world as Santiago had been when “too far out” after his big fish. But of course Hemingway could just as easily, following The Old Man and the Sea’s s
uccess, have turned to new materials as to old—unless the critics were right in what they said before that book: that he was running out of stuff. At least by implication Hemingway admits the problem in The Old Man and the Sea: Santiago has lost his luck; he catches no fish. The parallel to Hemingway is clear enough, and the return to Nick and Michigan and to the early years in Paris draws on his past when there may have been nothing else to write about. And even some of that would not hold out, as abortive attempts to return to Spain and Africa for two books testify. So too does the fragment Mary Hemingway has entitled “The Last Good Country.”
There are other possible explanations for Hemingway’s failure to complete the Nick Adams novel. Viewing the fragment within the context of the collected Nick Adams stories, the tale becomes another stage in Nick’s initiation into the world. Hemingway seems not to have decided just how old Nick is in this particular episode; he is young enough not to understand Mr. Packard’s joke about his having original sin, yet old enough to have gotten Trudy pregnant (a detail excised before publication) and already writing stories that are too morbid. But if there is some confusion about Nick’s age, it seems clear that Hemingway had in mind for this particular portrait the representation of a much more active Nick than is to be found in the other stories. Indeed, this Nick is impulsive, even willful. He has beaten the Evans boy in fights twice, and Nick contemplates killing him if he does not leave Nick alone. Fearing Nick will carry out his threat, Littless refuses to let him go out to hide without her, and here is a central conflict unique in the Nick stories. In the others Nick is essentially passive; things happen to him or to those around him, and the reader infers Nick’s response. In “The Last Good Country” Nick considers an irrevocable act, striking out for personal freedom by destroying that which intrudes upon it. But he must also consider Littless.
The reader can guess from the first sixty pages what the decision will be and why Nick decides he must not kill the Evans boy. The telling factor is Littless; once Nick agrees to take his sister with him, he assumes a duty he evidently has not acknowledged before. Repeatedly he worries over her comfort and safety, taking care that she rests well, eats well, and is warm enough at night. It is Nick’s love for Littless and his growing awareness of responsibility for her that will lead him to admit responsibility not only for himself but for the well-being of others. Packard explains just this to Suzie:
“Didn’t you ever want to kill anybody, Mr. John?”
“Yes. But it’s wrong and it doesn’t work out.”
“My father killed a man.”
“It didn’t do him any good.”
“He couldn’t help it.”
“You have to learn to help it.”3
Just how Nick learns to “help it” the reader does not know; that is what, in this case, Hemingway has left out. But sixty pages is enough of the novel to see that Nick, by caring for Littless, is maturing into an understanding of what it is that he must always do. “I have to think about things now the rest of my life,” Nick says to Littless toward the end of the fragment. His comment is his admission that he is neither as free nor as separate from others as he wants to be. Just as the younger Nick of “Indian Camp” is going to grow up to learn that he will indeed die, and the older Nick of “Summer People” is going to have to face up, eventually, to the superficiality of his own sense of difference from others, Nick in this story comes up against the reality that human relationships are inextricably tangled, and that, as things will work themselves out, there is no chance for the survival of the isolated meadow, a special sibling love, or even a self held separate from an encroaching world. Having said all this, Hemingway may have turned from the story because he found that, in sixty pages, he had said all that he wanted to say in this particular portrait of Nick.
Or perhaps Hemingway found his story headed in a direction he did not want to go. Perceptive readers have not missed an aspect of this fragment rare in the Hemingway canon, an aspect indicated by Mary Hemingway’s choice of a title. “The Last Good Country” is just that, a virgin place unknown and unspoiled by those who have raped the land around it, a land protected by a bad-tempered farmer and his worse-tempered bull, an impassable cedar swamp, and hemlock slashings miles wide. It is a perfect spot for Nick and Littless to hide, but it is more than that as well. It is truly pastoral, a bucolic land where trout hide beneath the banks of the fast, clear stream, where partridge sit unwarily in the trees, and where berries ripen at the far end of the meadow. If the reader overlooks the mildly preposterous business of Nick’s choosing twenty-two shorts in case he cannot get head shots at the partridge, he will find himself caught up in an idyll unmatched in Hemingway—and a communion surpassing those brief moments in For Whom the Bell Tolls when Robert Jordan and Maria find ways to isolate themselves from the rest of the strife-torn world.4
If the moments are not so brief in “The Last Good Country,” nevertheless it is clear that they cannot last. Pressures begin building almost with the arrival of Nick and Littless at Camp Number One. The outside may find a way to get in, Nick fears, and of course (though the fragment ends before the event) all the internal signs suggest the world will come calling in the form of the Evans boy, the warden’s son who cares only for trailing Nick and who will ruin everything. Spoiling it all, however, may have been a bit more than Hemingway could bring himself to do. It is easy to conjecture that the fragment ends with Nick and Littless in Camp Number One because Hemingway, after creating the pastoral, did not want to destroy it—and there was no way to continue the idyllic sojourn. His readers do not know the precise course Hemingway charted for the remainder of the novel, but the introduction of Splayzey, who in an obvious foreshadowing is warned not to use his gun against Nick, and Packard’s recollection of Splayzey under a name other than Henry J. Porter (a plot device for extricating Nick later from a tough spot), and the use of Camp Number One, which implies there will be Camp Number Two and perhaps Camp Number Three, each presumably representing the stages of deteriorating security, all these suggest things will get much worse before getting better. There are too many references to murder, to Nick’s desire to murder the Evans boy, to Littless’s fear Nick will do it, to Splayzey’s suspicious past, not to suggest an ugly predicament for Nick and Littless, a predicament perhaps in which Nick, by having chosen not to murder the Evans boy, places himself and Littless in clear danger of being murdered themselves, or brutalized. In addition, there are more than enough references to the love between Nick and Littless and to Littless’s incipient sexuality (“Gee, I hope I won’t start to be a girl while we’re on the trip,” Littless says) to suggest that Littless’s whimsical imaginings of humble whores and whores’ assistants may be a deliberate preparation for the threat of brutal rape, the paradigm for what man has done to the rest of the good country and what he will inevitably do to whatever he finds that is good and pure and innocent.
Evans and Splayzey are incapable of tracking Nick, but Packard and Suzie both fear the Evans boy might be able to find him. The easy way for Evans and Splayzey to get to Nick is to turn the boy loose to uncover Nick and his sister, hold Littless captive—a situation found in all three of the novels Littless carries with her—and try what they had earlier, making Nick come to them. Nick remarks of the three novels Littless carries that two are too old for her. Only Kidnapped is suitable, the story of a boy whose abduction leads mostly to a series of exciting adventures and finally to his rightful property and place. Wuthering Heights is too much a drama of sex and passion for Littless and too filled with incidents like the captivity of Cathy, held by Heathcliffe to force her marriage to Edgar Linton. It is Lorna Doone that Nick decides they will read together, certainly more appropriate for Littless than Wuthering Heights. But even Lorna Doone focuses in its central actions upon John Ridd’s fears for the safety of Lorna, held against her will and starved until she will agree to marry Carver Doone. Indeed, Ridd arrives to free Lorna just as the two drunken Doone clansmen are attempting to force themselv
es upon her. Neither Evans nor Splayzey seems a likely candidate to molest a child, but the Evans boy might be another matter. It is he who, by trailing Nick, spoils things, and it is he who has been damned ambiguously by Suzie as “no good” and “terrible.”
There are other incidents of rape in Hemingway, most notably that of Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls. That occurs before the action of the novel, and the reader discovers it only as part of Maria’s past. Her union with Robert Jordan is the best man can achieve in a corrupted world, and it is of course temporary. It comes close to the pastoral of “The Last Good Country,” falling just short of the perfect union, the sibling love of Littless and Nick that Littless’s sexual banterings assure us is asexual. But too good a thing is itself ominous. That union must suffer in the unwritten half of “The Last Good Country” the ruination that the outside world always serves up to innocence. “I guess those things straighten out,” Nick thinks of his sister’s too-strong attachment to him. And the reader knows just how these things straighten out in Hemingway’s world. Viewing the first sixty pages of the novel in this manner, some attempted assault on Littless seems more and more likely, and the rest of the novel harder and harder to write.
New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Page 43