The enormous disparity between Jim’s and Liz’s attitudes toward each other and the sex act is also strikingly conveyed by the setting of the seduction and its aftermath. It occurs outside rather than in bed; that is, in a nonprivate, “natural” setting such as would be appropriate for animal copulation. Further, the dock itself is made of hemlock (symbolic of death) and the planks are “hard and splintery and cold and Jim was heavy on her and he had hurt her” (85). The coarse planks contribute to, and are symbolic of, the psychic and physical pain of the sex act, and the striking repetition of the word “and” conveys Liz’s rush of negative emotions—emotions which are in no way mitigated by the fact that Jim falls asleep on top of her, “with his mouth a little open” (85). Liz “worked out from under him and sat up and straightened her skirt and coat and tried to do something with her hair” (85), a pathetic attempt to recreate the “neat,” “clean” Liz of the opening of the story. But Liz’s romantic illusions die hard, despite her brutal initiation into sex. Even though she is crying, cold, and miserable, and though “everything felt gone” (85), she kisses the sleeping drunk; and, as a gesture of her caring for him, tucks her coat “neatly and carefully” around him (86)—a last gasp of the maternal impulse which had previously surfaced as a desire to cook something special for him.7 Appropriately, a cold mist ends the story as Liz Coates—now coatless—returns home.
Hemingway tells us nothing of the aftermath of the seduction, and this fade-out ending is singularly appropriate for this story. We are left with a poignant sense of a girl caught in the Catch-22 of Western sexual mores: the very elements which render Liz so attractive—her neatness, cleanliness, youth, innocence, and dawning sexuality—are precisely what set her up for a disastrous deflowering on a warehouse dock. Small wonder that Hemingway himself felt that “Up in Michigan” was more sad than dirty.8
Crazy in Sheridan: Hemingway’s “Wine of Wyoming” Reconsidered
Lawrence H. Martin, Jr.
On May 31, 1930, Ernest Hemingway wrote from Key West to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, enclosing the typescript of a new story that Perkins had requested for the August 1930 Scribner’s Magazine. “I think you’ll like it,” Hemingway promised, adding, “this is a 1st flight story I promise you” (Letters, 323).1 He mentioned that the story was long—6,000 words—and that the dialogue was partly in French. “Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not a good story or has too much French in it,” Hemingway defensively ordered Perkins. “Everybody that reads Scribner’s knows some French or knows somebody that knows some French” (Letters, 323).2
The story was “Wine of Wyoming.” Perkins replied by return mail that the story was not only accepted but already in galleys, and Scribner’s Magazine editor Robert Bridges sent a check for the handsome amount of $600 (Baker, Life Story, 270).3 “Wine of Wyoming” appeared as promised in the August 1930 issue of Scribner’s, by which date Hemingway had left Key West for his annual working, fishing, and shooting vacation in northern Wyoming, near the locale of the story.
In the early spring of 1932, experiencing what he called “a big revival of belief in the short story” (Baker, Life Story, 291, 797), Hemingway began plans for a third collection of stories, some new and some previously published. Writing to Perkins about his plans, Hemingway reported finishing “three fine stories,” a number soon increased to seven, with two more in progress (Baker, Life Story, 797). Even though Hemingway had not yet finished Death in the Afternoon (it would be published in September 1932), he was looking ahead to the 1933 short-story collection Winner Take Nothing, which was—save for the anthologies The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories and eventually The Collected Stories—his third and last volume of short fiction.
When Winner Take Nothing appeared in October 1933, it contained fourteen stories, of which six were new and eight were republished magazine pieces. The new work included some important stories, notably “The Light of the World,” “A Way You’ll Never Be,” and “Fathers and Sons”; other new pieces, for example “A Day’s Wait,” were of minor merit, and one new “story,” if it can be called that, was embarrassingly inferior: “One Reader Writes.” The former magazine publications showed a similar range of artistic significance. The virtually definitive Hemingway story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” originally published in the March 1933 Scribner’s Magazine, was included, and “The Gambler, The Nun, and The Radio,” also a Scribner’s piece, was reprinted (it had appeared as “Give Us a Prescription, Doctor” in May 1933). Recapitulating a brilliant three-month run of appearances by Hemingway in Scribner’s was the April 1933 “Homage to Switzerland.” From other perodicals came “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” (House of Books, April 1933) and “The Sea Change” (This Quarter, December 1931). From Hemingway’s own Death in the Afternoon came a modified version of Chapter 12, “A Natural History of the Dead.” The lead story of the collection, the signature motif tale of Winner Take Nothing, “After The Storm,” came from the May 1932 Cosmopolitan. The volume’s oldest story, in terms of its original date of publication, was “Wine of Wyoming.”
The reviewers were not pleased by Winner Take Nothing. In fact, the reviews were the worst Hemingway had received in his relatively brief career, and they contributed to a growing abrasiveness between the author and his critics, a feeling that would be crystallized and sharpened in disparaging remarks about critics and criticism in Green Hills of Africa (1935) and especially in private opinions and correspondence for the rest of his life.4 This was not the first time, though, that Hemingway had received bad reviews, merited or unmerited. By 1933 Hemingway had been in the American literary arena a relatively short time, only eight years since the 1925 New York publication of In Our Time. Those eight years had been a remarkably productive period, seeing the publication of In Our Time (1925), Torrents of Spring (1926), The Sun Also Rises (1926), Men Without Women (1927), A Farewell to Arms (1929), and Death in the Afternoon (1932), and in addition numerous magazine pieces and the early private-press releases in France.
And Hemingway had in this brief time created, or accumulated, a personal and literary reputation5 against which his reviewers tended to read succeeding new works. After the laudatory and perceptive 1924 review by Edmund Wilson6 of the early, experimental Three Stories and Ten Poems (“Mr. Hemingway’s Dry-Points”), a vocabulary of critical terms epitomizing Hemingway’s work began to arise and to become, in effect, one-word summaries of Hemingway’s new and then-controversial style and outlook. Relating the style of the In Our Time stories to “cubist painting and Le Sacré du Printemps,” The New Republic’s Paul Rosenfeld noted Hemingway’s “brute, rapid, joyous jab of period upon period” and his selection of “harsh impersonal forces in the universe . . . blood and pain . . . and brutalities of existence” as subjects (22–23). By the time The Sun Also Rises appeared, words such as “futility” (“Study in Futility,” 5), “tragedy” (“Marital Tragedy,” 27), “detachment” (Aiken, 4), and “hard-boiled” (Tate, 642) were the reviewers’ staples. Men Without Women elicited “callous” (Dodd, 322), “raw” (“Mr. Hemingway’s Stories,” 7F), and another “tragedy” (Wilson, “The Sportsman’s Tragedy,” 102). A Farewell to Arms brought Robert Herrick’s “What is Dirt?”: a comparison of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which in Herrick’s opinion (and in censored form) was “literature,” and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, which Herrick considered “mere dirt.” However, no less a curmudgeon than H. L. Mencken found the same book a “brilliant evocation of the horrible squalor and confusion of war” (127). Mixed with these observations of the sensational and melodramatic were admiration and praise in varying degrees for Hemingway’s mastery of dialogue, economy of language, and basic sense of humanity, though focus and emphasis fell on what one paper, reporting later on Winner Take Nothing, called “realism to the point of being grewsome” [sic] (“Hemingway Tales,” 7E).
By the time Winner Take Nothing was published, certain expectations among reviewers and critics (and r
eaders, it might be assumed) had taken fixed form: that Hemingway had a predictable content and style, specializing in the brutal and the cruel expressed in terse dialogue and unelaborated narration and description.
Having established in the twenties and early thirties an innovative style and narrative technique, chosen frequently shocking subjects, and created a distinctive view of the modern postwar world, Hemingway now found himself a victim of his own invention. What the critics expected, evidently, was “growth,” by which they meant intellectual maturity superseding a decade of preoccupation with violence and alienation. One writer archly summarized Hemingway’s fault as a fixation upon “eating and drinking, travel, sport [and] coition . . . an enthusiastic delectatio morbosa,” and accused him of being “in danger of becoming as fin de siècle as his contemporary, William Faulkner” (Troy, 570). While the critics still admired (though less fervently than a decade before) Hemingway’s “sharply etched strokes” (“Hemingway’s First Book of Fiction in Four Years”) and “unforgettable incisiveness” (Canby, 217), they damned in chorus what they now saw as his “monotonous repetition” (Troy, 570), “strong echoes of earlier work” (Fadiman, 74), and “the same things” (Kronenberger, 6), asking, in the end, “Why bother to redemonstrate it?” (Fadiman, 74).
Against the background of general critical disapproval and even squeamishness, there were a few words of commendation for individual stories in Winner Take Nothing. “The Gambler, The Nun, and The Radio” was praised for its full characterization and its tragicomic observations about “the opium of the poor” (SS, 478) and “After The Storm” for its sinister atmosphere, though not for any possible political or social implications. “Homage to Switzerland” was cited solely (but correctly) as evidence that Hemingway was “a humorist of the first water” (Butcher, 16). The only story to be mentioned favorably several times was “Wine of Wyoming.”
Of those who recognized the significance of “Wine of Wyoming,” Horace Gregory, writing for the New York Herald Tribune, identified it as one of two stories (“Gambler” was the other) “that show a sudden expansion of Hemingway’s range.” It was, Gregory claimed, “one of the few instances in contemporary literature where the short story may be regarded as a superlative work of art.” Its “emotional truth,” Gregory said, “has its source in the most universal of human experiences,” and the story was successful because, in Gregory’s interpretation, “Hemingway is no longer content to present a situation and then let it answer for itself” (5). In this latter point Gregory was setting “Wine of Wyoming” apart from Hemingway stories to which critics objected on the grounds that the author was far too objective—that he merely “observed, overheard, impaled with his intelligence,” as Louis Kronenberger complained in the New York Times Book Review (6).
What Gregory broadly called “universal human experience” was defined somewhat more specifically by the Cincinnati Enquirer’s reviewer J. R. who found that “an expression of human sympathy” was the dominant quality of “Wine of Wyoming,” particularly in the contrast of “the sweet and generous natures of Madame Fontan and her husband” and “the rudeness and vulgarity of their American customers” (7). Perhaps the brevity of a newspaper review cut short further development of this idea; it deserved elaboration, for the contrast of immigrant European generosity and native American crudity is the heart of the story and a comment particularly on the American experience as well as upon “universal experience.” Oddly, the European-American tension of the story also drew a negative reading: that Hemingway was indulging in “all the old nostalgias” (Troy, 570)—in this case, nostalgia for an idealized Europe, perceived as the home of a culture superior to the former expatriate author’s own. This is a short view and a shallow one, for the French family, the Fontans, generous and sweet as they may be, are bootlegging paysans rejecting a strange protestant culture, not European aristocrats, and their clients would still be crude and insensitive regardless of nationality. The tone of the critic’s observation is negative, but nostalgia, if that is what it is, for decency in the face of rudeness is neither pretentious nor wrong.
After the 1933 reviews of Winner Take Nothing, despite favorable mention, “Wine of Wyoming” went into eclipse. While other Hemingway stories took their place in cultural mythology and school anthologies—is there a student who has not read “The Killers” or “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”?—“Wine of Wyoming” became a literary orphan. According to the Wagner (1977) and Hanneman (1967, 1975) bibliographies, “Wine of Wyoming” has never been separately reprinted or anthologized. (The odd exception to this bibliographical fact is its translation into many other languages for foreign editions; it can be found in Norwegian, Korean, and Czech, among others.)
The virtual disappearance of “Wine of Wyoming” might be attributed to shortcomings on some scale of artistic excellence, to the macaronic Anglo-French dialogue whose difficulty for readers Hemingway underestimated when he recommended the story to Perkins, or more probably to the fact that in subject and tone the story is not “typical” or “classic” in the received mode of Hemingway’s hallmark fiction. It lacks the startling violence of “Indian Camp,” the looming threat of “The Killers,” the stark alienation of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” the enigmatic heroism and death of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” It is not about aberration (“God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” “The Sea Change”) nor about war. It is, if anything, quite domestic—hardly “Hemingwayesque” in theme and subject. Yet it is quintessentially in the Hemingway fashion in its rhetorical obliqueness, perhaps Hemingway’s most distinctive literary trait.
Like almost all of Hemingway’s fiction, “Wine of Wyoming” began with the artist’s personal experience. After six years in Europe, Hemingway returned to the United States with his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer in the spring of 1928, via Havana to Key West. In the summer of that year, he left Key West for the Rocky Mountains, partly to go fishing but mainly to work on the draft of A Farewell to Arms away from the tropical heat and humidity of his new home. After staying at a dude ranch for a few days, Hemingway abruptly left and took up residence at another ranch less frequented by tourists near Sheridan, Wyoming. In Sheridan he took Pauline in late August to meet Charles and Alice Moncini, a French couple who operated a speakeasy at their house, where one could sit “on the vine-shaded back porch drinking cold home-brewed beer, with a view across the yellow grainfields towards the distant brown mountains,” and where the Moncinis and the Hemingways “all spoke French together” (Baker, Life Story, 252). Because 1928 was a presidential election year, with the vote between the Roman Catholic Alfred E. Smith and the postwar reconstruction expert Herbert Hoover only a few months in the future, conversation turned naturally to politics, as well as to Prohibition; the noble experiment of the Eighteenth Amendment, which the Moncinis (and much of the country) were flouting, had been law since 1920 and would continue so until 1933.
The summer of 1928 was a time of consolidation and recommencing for Hemingway. He had a new marriage, a new son, a new book nearing completion, and, in effect, a new country to enjoy and understand. He had left the United States a newlywed, twenty-two-year-old, unknown “Canadian” newspaperman, and he returned as the established author of four books, one of them the successful and epoch-making The Sun Also Rises. He was regarded as an important voice of the new postwar literary generation, and another book solidly confirming his reputation was about to be published. In this interlude full of optimism and promise, it is not surprising that he resolved “whenever it suited him” to “put the Moncinis into a story, a character sketch full of cleanliness and order, a quiet account of simple people who made and drank the wine of Wyoming” (Baker, Life Story, 252).
Finishing A Farewell to Arms intervened between Hemingway’s mention of “good wine and a nice French family” in an August 18, 1928, letter to Guy Hickock (Letters, 284) and his May 31, 1930, letter to Perkins accompanying the finished Wyoming story. In those two years a minor incident, doubt
less a commonplace in Prohibition days, evolved from a fragmentary anecdote into an extended piece of fiction. Much later, on November 16, 1933, three years after “Wine of Wyoming” first appeared and a few weeks after the reviewers had savaged Winner Take Nothing, Hemingway wrote a long letter to Perkins in which he answered the criticism critic by critic and point by point. The letter is remarkable not for Hemingway’s rebuttals (a tendency that would grow over the years) or even for the wounded, bitter, and quite personal outbursts against individual critics, but for an assertion of his writing techniques. The explanation is an oversimplification, but even in its reductio terms it sets forth a philosophy of artistic composition: “I write some stories absolutely as they happen i.e. Wine of Wyoming, . . . others I invent completely—Killers, Hills Like White Elephants, The Undefeated,” Hemingway heatedly told Perkins. Emphatically he added, “Nobody can tell which ones I make up completely. . . . The point is I want them all to sound as though they really happened.” As for the “poor dumb” critics who dismissed his success at this technique as “just skillful reporting,” Hemingway retorted, “I’m a reporter and an imaginative writer and I can still imagine plenty and there will be stories to write as they happened as long as I live” (Letters, 400).
Hemingway is referring, of course, to his aesthetic principle of truthfulness, whether reported or created. While it is conceivable that Hemingway’s own example “Wine of Wyoming” was recorded “absolutely” as it happened—his biographer Baker says on uncertain evidence that at the Moncinis “Ernest listened intently, watching the faces and trying to remember all that was said” (Life Story, 252)—it is evident that this story is more complex, and far more interpretive, than the “skillful reporting” of a Toronto Star dispatch.
New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Page 49