New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

12 Hemingway refers to Malatesta twice in Selected Letters, pp. 375, 654: first in a 1932 letter, where he says that Malatesta’s name in twenty years will sound more honest than Stalin’s; second in a 1948 letter, where he recalls his walking trip with Pound.

  13 This definition, and the ones two paragraphs below, come from The Cambridge Italian Dictionary (New York: Cambridge Press, 1962).

  14 In the article cited in note 2 above, Paul Smith suggests (p. 239) that there must have been at least three stages in the story’s composition: (1) the original typed version, along with its typed revisions; (2) the later penciled revisions, made on the original typescript; and (3) final revisions incorporated in the setting copy for publication.

  In the original version "mysteriously" has been typed in as an interlinear addition. But the "mysterious" of the second paragraph does not appear in the story until the final version for publication.

  In the original version "piombo" appears eight times. With the penciled revisions we find that the word has been added twice: in the sentences "We must have piombo" and "Your stuff is all clean and new but you haven’t [sic] any piombo." In the final, for publication version this second sentence replaces "piombo" with "lead": "Your stuff is all clean and new but you have no lead." Obviously, Hemingway is using these words with great care, which may suggest that they are intended to imply something below the story’s surface.

  See Hemingway’s typescript (EH/ts. 644) and carbon for setting copy (EH/ts. 203) in the Kennedy Library’s Hemingway collection.

  15 If "Cat in the Rain" and "Out of Season" are really "twin" stories, then it may be worth noticing that at the end of the first one the big cat brought up to the room by the maid (sent by the hotel owner who is "in" both stories) is in a sense "hanging": the cat "pressed tight against her and swung down against her body." The drop on the scaffolding from which Sam Cardinelli is to be hung "swung" on ball bearings. Again it’s a matter of words.

  Robert E. Fleming, ”Perversion and the Writer in ‘The Sea Change’”

  1 Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), p. 227.

  2 Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), pp. 178–79.

  3 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks, ed. Randall Stewart (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1932), p. 106.

  4 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964), 3:81–82.

  5 Joseph DeFalco, The Hero in Hemingway’s Short Stories (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963), p. 177.

  6 Ernest Hemingway, The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner’s, 1966), p. 400. Future references to "The Sea Change" are from this text and appear in parentheses.

  7 DeFalco, p. 176.

  8 J. F. Kobler, "Hemingway’s ‘The Sea Change’: A Sympathetic View of Homosexuality," Arizona Quarterly 26 (1970): 322.

  9 Sheldon Norman Grebstein, Hemingway’s Craft (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), p. 114.

  10 Box 28, Item 681, Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library. This manuscript is catalogued as Item 80 D, under the title "What do the punks drink, James?" in Philip Young and Charles Mann, The Hemingway Manuscripts: An Inventory (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969), p. 52.

  11 William Shakespeare, The Tempest I, ii, 396–401. The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. William Allan Neilson and Charles Jarvis Hill (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942), p. 546.

  12 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), p. 20.

  13 George Plimpton, "An Interview with Ernest Hemingway," in Hemingway and His Critics, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), p. 34. The interview first appeared in Paris Review 5, no. 18 (1958): 60–89. On Hemingway’s application of the iceberg principle, see Julian Smith, "Hemingway and the Thing Left Out," Journal of Modern Literature 1 (1970): 169–82.

  14 Ernest Hemingway, "The Art of the Short Story," Paris Review 23, no. 79 (Spring 1981):

  15 Morley Callaghan, That Summer in Paris (Toronto: Macmillan, 1963), p. 30.

  16 The Sun Also Rises, p. 178.

  17 Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not (New York: Scribner’s, 1937), p. 186.

  Alice Hall Petry, “Coming of Age in Hortons Bay: Hemingway’s ‘Up in Michigan’”

  1 See Arthur Waldhorn, A Reader’s Guide to Ernest Hemingway (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), pp. 43–44, and Charles A. Fenton, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years (New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1954), pp. 152–54. It should be noted, however, that even in this early work Hemingway was no slavish imitator of either writer. Philip Young remarks that "Up in Michigan" is "too hard-headed" for Anderson and "cut off by its subject matter" from Stein (Ernest Hemingway [New York: Rinehart, 1952], p. 150). In fact, Stein contended that the tale was inaccrochable, which Young explains as "an invented and rather difficult term no one seems to want to translate. Literally, ‘unhookable—or, since accrocher can mean among things ‘to pawn,’ ‘unhockable’? Probably not; perhaps she meant that because of the sex you couldn’t hook it up with an editor; hence, in effect, ‘unprintable’" (Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966], p. 180n). In fact, Hemingway did encounter difficulty in attempting to publish "Up in Michigan." Neither Edmund Wilson nor Maxwell Perkins cared for the story, and publisher Horace Liveright declined to include it in In Our Time (Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story [New York: Bantam, 1970], pp. 174, 234, 423). It initially was privately printed in Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) in a limited edition of 300 copies; it first became available to the general public in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories (New York: Scribner’s, 1938).

  2 For information on the background and prototypes of "Up in Michigan," see Constance Cappel Montgomery, Hemingway in Michigan (New York: Fleet, 1966), pp. 119–27.

  3 Fenton, pp. 152–54.

  4 Sheldon Norman Grebstein, Hemingway’s Craft (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), p. 80.

  5 Young argues that the title is a "sardonic allusion" to "a popular song of the period which praised the bucolic virtues of life in that region" (Ernest Hemingway, p. 236, n. 5). This seems doubtful, especially in view of Hemingway’s blatant use of sexual diction and symbols in this story. My belief that the title is an obscenity has been anticipated by Joseph M. Flora in "Hemingway’s ‘Up in Michigan,’" Studies in Short Fiction 6 (Summer 1969), pp. 465–66.

  6 Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 135.

  7 I disagree with the contention of Robert W. Lewis, Jr., that Liz’s "thoughts on love are only heightened by the act of sex" (Hemingway on Love [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965], p. 4). Liz clearly is confused throughout the seduction, and "everything felt gone" when Jim was finished.

  8 Baker, Life, p. 423.

  Lawrence H. Martin, Jr., “Crazy in Sheridan: Hemingway’s ‘Wine of Wyoming’ Reconsidered”

  1 The May 31, 1930, Hemingway-Perkins letter is obviously about "Wine of Wyoming." There is a possibility—the dates are plausible—that the story may be the one referred to in an October 11, 1928, letter to Perkins as "3/4 done." JFK Library catalog lists item 837, a "typescript/manuscript," differing from other "sparsely corrected" typescripts of the story.

  2 The dialogue is about half French and half English, sometimes each language alone and sometimes mixed. In the story the narrator notes of Mme. Fontan, "She spoke French, but it was only French occasionally, and there were many English words and some English constructions" (SS, p. 451). Hemingway knew French reasonably well, but his knowledge was colloquial, not literary. Doubting his own accuracy, Hemingway prevailed on Lewis Galantière in New York in June 1930 to check the galleys for idiom and accent. Galantière had helped Marguerite Ga
y translate Sherwood Anderson’s books into French. In 1921 Anderson had written letters introducing Hemingway to Galantière (then in France), Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, and others. See Baker, Life Story, pp. 270, 109–10.

  3 The $600 fee for "Wine of Wyoming" was a considerable amount of money in 1930, but it was only a fraction of the $2700 Hemingway received from Cosmopolitan for the May 1932 publication of "After The Storm," which became the opening story in Winner Take Nothing. In a March 26, 1932, letter to John Dos Passos, Hemingway gleefully reports that he had "sold the After The Storm story for plenty" (Letters, p. 355).

  4 At this time Hemingway was developing the notion that critics got their opinions from each other and that they formed a clique, particularly in New York. In Green Hills of Africa (p. 23) he advises writers to avoid reading critics, whose opinions might inflate the writer’s self-image or make him lose confidence in good work, all without just cause. Nonetheless, Hemingway assiduously followed reviews of his own books.

  5 For a provocative thesis about Hemingway’s creating and cultivating a personal reputation and mystique, see John Raeburn, Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as Public Writer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

  6 On October 18, 1924, Hemingway wrote from Paris to thank Wilson for the favorable review. In it he briefly explains the content and technique of In Our Time, which he was trying to sell in the United States. Hemingway gruffly flatters Wilson for his intelligence and authority (he had been wise enough to recognize Hemingway) and for his writing style (Letters, pp. 128–29). Later, critics who gave Hemingway unfavorable reviews were "dumb" and worse.

  7 Hemingway’s enthusiasm for the West emerged as an article, "The Clark’s Fork Valley, Wyoming," in Vogue 93 (February 1939): 68, 157.

  8 The 1928 Democratic party platform included a weak, pro forma endorsement of Prohibition, but both the party and its candidate were assumed to favor repeal.

  9 It is an interesting measure of the story’s obscurity or lack of appeal even to Hemingway specialists that Johnston’s article, "Hemingway’s ‘Wine of Wyoming’: Disappointment in America," Western American Literature 9 (1973): 159–67, is the only published essay on the subject. Johnston explains the political and social issues of the day, and he makes a convincing case that "Wine of Wyoming" is a strongly political statement about—as Hemingway said in To Have and Have Not (1937)—"the American dream when it becomes a nightmare." Johnston concentrates on social and political questions; he does not consider the story in the context of Hemingway’s aesthetics or broader philosophical themes.

  The story’s point of view and narrator are discussed by Sheldon Norman Grebstein, Hemingway’s Craft, pp. 63–67. Grebstein focuses on ways in which the narrator resembles, and differs from, the Fontans, and he emphasizes the way that the narrator’s identity contributes to the story’s criticism of American cultural values.

  Joseph M. Flora, in Hemingway’s Nick Adams, pp. 223–35 gives essay-length treatment to "Wine of Wyoming," especially the story’s progress—or descent—from comedy to irony.

  10 Flora says that young Andre "entertain[s]" the narrator and "creates an aura of a normal family life" (p. 227). But there is an edge to the son’s cleverness about cheating on the price of the movies and his badgering about the use of a rifle. He does read books ("a library book—Frank on a Gunboat"), but he seems to illustrate conduct less lovable than ordinary adolescent rambunctiousness.

  Aiken, Conrad. “Expatriates.” New York Herald Tribune (October 31, 1926): VII, 4.

  Baker, Carlos, ed. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1927–1961 (New York: Scribner’s, 1981).

  ———. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner’s, 1969).

  ———. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).

  Butcher, Fanny. “Short Stories Still Live As Works of Art.” Chicago Daily Tribune (October 28, 1933): 16.

  Canby, Henry Seidel. “Farewell to the Nineties.” Saturday Review of Literature 10 (October 28, 1933): 217.

  Dodd, L. W. “Simple Annals of the Callous.” Saturday Review of Literature 4 (November 19, 1927): 322–33.

  Fadiman, Clifton. “A Letter to Mr. Hemingway.” New Yorker 9 (October 28, 1933): 74–75.

  Flora, Joseph M. Hemingway’s Nick Adams (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).

  Grebstein, Sheldon Norman. Hemingway’s Craft. (Carbondale, III.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973).

  Gregory, Horace. “Ernest Hemingway Has Put On Maturity.” New York Herald Tribune (October 29, 1933): VII, 5.

  Griffin, Peter. Along With Youth: Hemingway, The Early Years (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

  Hanneman, Audre. Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive Bibliography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967).

  ———. Supplement to Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive Bibliography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975).

  Hemingway, Ernest. The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner’s, 1938).

  ———. Green Hills of Africa (New York: Scribner’s, 1935).

  ———. A Farewell To Arms (New York: Scribner’s, 1929).

  “Hemingway’s First Book of Fiction in Four Years.” Kansas City Star, November 4, 1933.

  “Hemingway’s Tales.” Springfield Republican (November 26, 1933): 7E.

  Herrick, Robert. “What Is Dirt?” Bookman 70 (November 1929): 258–62.

  Johnston, Kenneth G. “Hemingway’s ‘Wine of Wyoming’: Disappointment in America.” Western American Literaturei 9 (1973): 159–67.

  J. R. “Hemingway’s Gamy Dishes.” Cincinnati Enquirer (November 4, 1933): 7.

  Kronenberger, Louis. “Hemingway’s New Stories.” New York Times Book Review (November 5, 1933): 6.

  “Marital Tragedy.” New York Times Book Review (October 31, 1926): 27.

  Mencken, H. L. “Fiction By Adept Hands.” American Mercury 19 (January 1930): 127.

  “Mr. Hemingway’s Stories of Life In The Raw.” Springfield Republican (November 20, 1927): 7F.

  Raeburn, John. Fame Became of Him: Hemingway As Public Writer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

  Rosenfeld, Paul. “Tough Earth.” New Republic 45 (November 1925): 22–23.

  “Study in Futility.” Cincinnati Enquirer (October 30, 1925): 5.

  Tate, Allen. “Hard-Boiled.” Nation 123 (December 15, 1926): 642.

  Troy, William. “Mr. Hemingway’s Opium.” Nation 137 (November 15, 1933): 570.

  Wagner, Linda Welshimer. Ernest Hemingway: A Reference Guide (Boston: Hall, 1977).

  Wilson, Edmund. “Mr. Hemingway’s Dry-Points.” Dial 77 (October 1924): 340–41.

  ———. “The Sportsman’s Tragedy.” New Republic 53 (December 14, 1927): 102–3.

  Paul Smith, “A Partial Review: Critical Essays on the Short Stories, 1976–1989”

  Adair, William. “Landscapes of the Mind: ‘Big Two-Hearted River.’” College Literature 4 (1977): 144–51.

  Beck, Warren. “The Shorter Happy Life of Mrs. Macomber.” Modern Fiction Studies 21 (November 1955): 28–37.

  ———. “Then and Now—Hemingway.” Modern Fiction Studies 21 (Autumn 1975): 377–85.

  Beegel, Susan. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1988).

  ———, ed. Hemingway’s Neglected Short Fiction: New Perspectives. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989). Includes:

  Gerry Brenner, “A Semiotic Inquiry into Hemingway’s ‘A Simple Enquiry.’”

  Robert E. Gajdusek, ‘“An Alpine Idyll’: The Sun-Struck Mountain Vision and the Necessary Valley Journey.”

  Bruce Henricksen, “The Bullfight Story and Critical Theory.”

  Allen Josephs, “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Stories, or the Spanish Civil War as Reality.”

  Michael Reynolds, “‘Homage to Switzerland’: Einstein’s Train Stops
at Hemingway’s Station.”

  Phillip Sipiora, “Ethical Narration in ‘My Old Man.’”

  H. R. Stoneback, “‘Mais Je Reste Catholique,’ Communion, Betrayal, and Aridity in ‘Wine of Wyoming.’”

  Bickford Sylvester, “Hemingway’s Italian Waste Land: The Complex Unity of ‘Out of Season.’”

  Bender, Bert. “Margot Macomber’s Gimlet.” College Literature 8 (1981): 12–20.

  Benert, Annette. “Survival Through Irony: Hemingway’s ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.’” Studies in Short Fiction 11 (1974): 181–87.

  Bennett, Warren. “The Manuscript and the Dialogue of ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.’” American Literature 50 (1979): 613–24.

  ———. “The Characterization and the Problematic Dialogue in Hemingway’s ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.’” Hemingway Review 9 (Spring 1990): 94–123.

  Brenner, Gerry. Concealments in Hemingway’s Works (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983).

  Carabine, Keith. “‘Big Two-Hearted River’: A Reinterpretation.” Hemingway Review 1 (Spring 1982): 39–44.

  Cass, Colin S. “The Look of Hemingway’s ‘In Another Country.’” Studies in Short Fiction 18 (1981): 309–13.

  Cowley, Malcolm. Introduction. The Portable Hemingway (New York: Viking Press, 1945).

  DeFalco, Joseph. The Hero in Hemingway’s Short Stories. 1963 (Richard West, 1983).

  Donaldson, Scott. “The Wooing of Ernest Hemingway.” American Literature 53 (January 1982): 691–710.

  Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).

  Flora, Joseph M. Hemingway’s Nick Adams (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).

  ———. Ernest Hemingway: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne, 1989).

  Gertzman, Jay A. “Hemingway’s Writer-Narrator in ‘The Denunciation.’” Research Studies 47 (December 1979) 244–52.

  Gibb, Robert. “He Made Him Up: ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ as Doppelganger.” Hemingway Notes 5 (Fall 1979): 20–24.