famous, mainly as the author of the novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms .
By 1927 he had divorced Hadley and married Pauline Pfeiffer. He had also published
In Our Time (1925) and Men Without Women (1927) . Five years after publishing Winner
Take Nothing (1933) , he collected the three separate volumes of stories and added to
them a handful of other pieces – four stories written after 1933: “ The Snows of Kili-
manjaro ” (1936), “ The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber ” (1936), “ The Capital
of the World ” (1936), and “ Old Man at the Bridge ” (1937); one early story previously
bypassed for commercial publication, “ Up in Michigan ” ( 1923 , Three Stories and Ten
Poems ); and The Fifth Column , a play set in Civil - War Spain – to make up The Fifth
Column and The First Forty - Nine Stories (1938) , the only collective gathering of his
stories to appear during his lifetime. After Hemingway ’ s death, on July 2, 1961, in
Ketchum, Idaho, there appeared two other collections of his short fi ction, The Fifth
Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (1969) , containing previously pub-
lished but uncollected stories, and The Nick Adams Stories (1972) , containing stories
previously published in In Our Time , Men Without Women and Winner Take Nothing ,
along with unpublished stories and fragments. Still subject to debate is whether or
not A Moveable Feast (1964) , the fi rst of Hemingway ’ s works to appear after his death,
is more profi tably read as a memoir of Hemingway ’ s Paris years or as a collection of
stories and sketches in which the names of characters and places are real – a story
cycle that melds fact and fi ction.
Hemingway ’ s apprenticeship as a serious writer of short stories cannot be fully
traced, let alone documented. It is known that upon arriving in Europe late in 1921,
he began to write fi ction that he tried assiduously to publish, with little success. Then
nearly all of his early short stories were lost in December 1922. A valise containing
nearly all the stories he had written to that date was stolen from his wife while she
was carrying them to Hemingway, who was in Lausanne. Just how many stories were
lost has never been determined. Three stories from that period that did survive – “ Up
in Michigan, ” “ Out of Season, ” and “ My Old Man ” – achieved print in Hemingway ’ s
fi rst book, Three Stories and Ten Poems , issued in 1923 in Paris by Contact Publishing
Company in a fi rst printing run of only 300 copies.
As Hemingway ’ s earliest known work in the genre, these three stories deserve more
than passing attention. “ My Old Man, ” among the most derivative of Hemingway ’ s
stories, parodies, in an honorifi c way, the style and subject matter of characteristic
stories by Sherwood Anderson and Ring Lardner. It is written from the point of view
226
George Monteiro
of a boy who never fully understands the nature or the import of his “ autobiographi-
cal ” tale about his life with his father, a jockey, at the European racetracks. The father ’ s
true character reveals itself in the story the callow youth tells in the familiar puzzled
style defi ned and nurtured by Anderson in his racetrack stories and elsewhere. Like
Anderson, Hemingway follows a pattern of initiation that leaves the boy more expe-
rienced in the raw ways of the world but barely more perceptive. Like Lardner,
Hemingway chooses to center on an adolescent “ tough, ” one living in a know - it - all
world, and speaking that world ’ s language, but knowing very little, and, at the end,
having what he started out knowing brought into doubt. “ Up in Michigan, ” a story
that Hemingway ’ s fi rst trade publisher would not permit him to include in In Our
Time , tells the story of a young woman ’ s fi rst sexual experience. The story again deals
with an initiation that leaves the central character seemingly more experienced but
actually less knowledgeable and in greater confusion. She never realizes the extent to
which she has romanticized the young blacksmith, or that the rough sex on the
hemlock planks of the dock is tantamount to the rape others would see in it. The
word “ it ” – in defi nite and indefi nite senses – appears throughout the story, often
standing for “ sex. ” This substitution/omission works aesthetically, however, because
sex is precisely what the young woman, given her background, would repress. The
way she displaces her own sexual attraction in favor of other details is rendered in the
following passage, foreshadowing as it does the much later statement, “ She was fright-
ened but she wanted it. She had to have it but it frightened her ” : “ Liz liked Jim very
much. She liked it the way he walked over from the shop and often went to the kitchen
door to watch for him to start down the road. She liked it about his mustache … She
liked it very much that he didn ’ t look like a blacksmith. … One day she found that
she liked it the way the hair was black on his arms and how white they were above
the tanned line when he washed up in the washbasin outside the house. Liking that
made her feel funny ” (62, 59). 2 Horace Liveright, Hemingway ’ s fi rst trade publisher,
was not the only one to fi nd “ Up in Michigan ” too “ outspoken ” for publication. Ger-
trude Stein thought so too, telling its author that the story was
“
inaccrochable , ”
meaning that it was the equivalent of a painting that could not be “ hung ” for public
display. That it was Stein who admonished Hemingway is somewhat surprising, for
in its stylistic rhythm and repetition of words in only slightly varied sentences, “ Up
in Michigan ” epitomizes the early infl uence of Stein ’ s writing, notably in The Making
of Americans and Three Lives , on Hemingway ’ s short fi ction.
“ Out of Season, ” set in Italy, is a story of a small world in which everyone is out
of sorts and everything is out of sync. The old guide drinks so much that he cannot
fulfi ll what is required to ensure the success of the fi shing venture on which the young
couple embarks. To start with, the fi shing, out of season, is illegal. But because they
have forgotten the lead sinkers the fi shing itself goes awry. Yet this, superfi cially the
guide ’ s mishap and misfortune, merely refl ects the true burden of the story, which is
to show just what the couple ’ s spiritual weather is like. The woman is out of sorts,
as is the man, and their relationship is out of sync. The story ends with the drunken
guide ’ s promise that things will go better the next day. It ’ s a fond hope, though, for
The Hemingway Story
227
the young man has the last word: “ I may not be going, said the young gentleman,
very probably not. I will leave word with the padrone at the hotel offi ce ” (139).
Hemingway
’
s second book, with a printing of 170 copies, appeared in 1924.
Brought out by the Three Mountains Press in Paris, in our time (the contents of which,
a year later, would be incorporated into In Our Time ) consists of eighteen prose chap-
ters. The book was one volume of “ The Inquest ” (1923 – 4), a series of avant - garde
titles edited by E
zra Pound, which included work by Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and
William Carlos Williams, among others. Manuscript material now in the Hemingway
Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library shows that Hemingway was trying to name
the sub - genre to which these pieces belonged. Before he settled on the rubric “ chapter ”
for the pieces published in in our time , he tried out “ episodes ” and “ unwritten stories. ”
Later readers, responding more directly to their inclusion in In Our Time , have chosen
to call them by different names, for example, “ inter - chapters, ” “ vignettes, ” and “ min-
iatures. ” Probably begun as exercises in condensing the raw materials of narrative,
most of them attempt to convey the emotional and spiritual ambience of a single
incident. For its value as an example of Hemingway ’ s early realistic prose, it is instruc-
tive to look at one of them. Here is the whole of chapter 1 :
Everybody was drunk. The whole battery was drunk going along the road in the dark.
We were going to the Champagne. The lieutenant kept riding his horse out into the
fi elds and saying to him, “ I ’ m drunk, I tell you, mon vieux . Oh, I am so soused. ” We
went along the road all night in the dark and the adjutant kept riding up alongside my
kitchen and saying, “ You must put it out. It is dangerous. It will be observed. ” We
were fi fty kilometers from the front but the adjutant worried about the fi re in my
kitchen. It was funny going along that road. That was when I was a kitchen corporal.
( Complete Short Stories 65)
It is a piece of naturalistic prose, told in the fi rst person, in which nothing seems to
happen. Years later, in 1935, Hemingway would publish Green Hills of Africa , a book
of travels in which he “ attempted to write an absolutely true book to see whether the
shape of a country and the pattern of a month ’ s action can, if truly presented, compete
with a work of the imagination ” (v). In both instances, in the chapters of in our time
and the experimental narrative of Green Hills of Africa , Hemingway was working
toward stretching fi ction in the direction of actuality. In chapter 1 , as elsewhere – fi rst
in in our time and then at intervals throughout his career (see, for example, the motives
and incidents that run through the hero ’ s mind in “ The Snows of Kilimanjaro ” ) – he
tests the dramatic possibilities of what might be termed a memorate : an image or sensa-
tion or a small complex of the two that seemingly persists in the author ’ s or his nar-
rator ’ s memory. Here, in chapter 1 , we fi nd many of the familiar characteristics of
Hemingway ’ s early prose: short sentences; simple, ordinary language; repetition and
redundancy; the occasional use of a foreign phrase, the general meaning of which is
clear from the context. And, of course, there is war as subject. Other chapters focus
on bullfi ghting and crime as well as war. The tenth chapter treats, in a radically
foreshortened way, materials that Hemingway later developed into his war novel of
228
George Monteiro
depression and spiritual numbness, A Farewell to Arms . When he included it in In Our
Time , presenting it no longer as a chapter but as a story, he titled it “ A Very Short
Story. ” He also turned chapter 11 into a story, entitling it “ The Revolutionist. ” Such
conversions may have resulted from Hemingway ’ s recognition that they were different
from the other sixteen untitled chapters in in our time or, more likely, from his need
to expand his fi rst full collection of short stories. In any case, to put together In Our
Time , Hemingway was compelled to gather all of his available fi ction from his two
previous books, along with the stories he had written since the loss of that notorious
suitcase. For “ Up in Michigan ” he was able to substitute “ The Battler, ” written for
the volume and not previously published.
Besides the fi fteen chapters referred to above, In Our Time includes thirteen stories,
one of which is presented in two parts. Beginning with the 1930, second edition of
the book, all subsequent editions begin with an introductory piece, at fi rst labeled
“ Introduction by the Author ” but subsequently given the permanent title “ On the
Quai at Smyrna. ” But in the1925 edition the book had begun with “ Indian Camp. ”
Few writers have opened a fi rst collection of stories with a more powerful or charac-
teristic piece. “ Indian Camp ” can be looked at, from one point of view, as an overture
of themes that both permeate the rest of volume and announce the concerns of much
of Hemingway ’ s subsequent work. It presents as a child the Nick Adams who had
already appeared briefl y in Hemingway ’ s work as a soldier wounded on the Italian
front (chapter 7 of in our time ). The narrative, although in the third person, reveals
the central consciousness of the child, the reader usually seeing only what the child
sees. The boy ’ s rite of passage takes place when his father, a physician, takes the boy
along to attend an Indian woman in labor and has the boy “ assist ” him (he jokes that
the boy is his “ interne ” ). Under primitive conditions and using rudimentary imple-
ments, the father delivers the baby, a boy. Exhilarated, he boasts that this one is “ for
the medical journal, ” only to discover that the baby ’ s father, lying quietly in the upper
bunk, has cut his throat from ear to ear. O. Henry, still very much in vogue at the
time, might well have ended the story here at the moment of the shocking discovery
that the “ proud ” father has committed suicide. Hemingway does not. He follows the
doctor and his son out into the dawn as they row across the water away from the camp
and back home. Nick continues to ask questions – about women, suicide, and death
– and his father continues to answer those questions as best he can. And what does
Nick, who has witnessed such pain and suffering, fi nally conclude? “ In the early
morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt
quite sure that he would never die ” (70). Nick will live on to learn to accept the fact
that he, too, will suffer the common doom; but at this moment it is his child ’ s belief
of personal immortality that quiets him before the act of violence to which he has
just been exposed.
Nick as child, adolescent, and adult appears in six other stories in In Our Time :
“ The Doctor and the Doctor ’ s Wife ” ( Transatlantic Review , 1924), which focuses on
the character of Dr. Adams as revealed in unpleasant encounters with a workman and
with his own wife and a concluding meeting with his son; “ The End of Something, ”
The Hemingway Story
229
which dramatizes the end of a young love relationship over which hovers the compet-
ing claim of adolescent male companionship; “ The Three Day Blow ” ( “ the greatest
drunk story in the language, ” John Berryman once said in conversation), which shows
two boys taking themselves seriously and self - importantly at a time when Nick is
depressed at having broken up with his girl friend; “ The Battler, ” a brief tale in which
Nick, while riding the rails, runs into a punch - drunk ex - prizefi ghter traveling with
a
black man who acts as his keeper; “ Cross Country Snow ” (1925), which presents
Nick, recently married, on a skiing vacation in Europe with a friend, lamenting that
the responsibilities attending marriage and imminent parenthood will bring to an
end the pleasures of “ bumming ” around at will; and “ Big Two - Hearted River ” (1925),
a story of the adult Nick fi shing alone in Michigan ’ s Upper Peninsula.
“ A Very Short Story ” and “ The Revolutionist ” were fi rst published as chapters in
in our time ; “ My Old Man ” and “ Out of Season ” had appeared in Three Stories and Ten
Poems ; “ Mr. and Mrs. Elliot ” (1924 – 5), which also caused Hemingway problems with
his publisher, satirizes the domestic life and sleeping arrangements of a desiccated
poetaster given to drinking white wine in the evening and writing reams of poetry
during the night. The satirical mode of this story is uncharacteristic of Hemingway ’ s
early fi ction. “ Soldier ’ s Home ” treats with simple power the theme of the returning
war veteran ’ s disgust and despair. Returning too late to receive even the hero ’ s fl eeting
welcome, he drops, depressingly, into a world in which nothing works for him.
Everything causes him more trouble than it is worth. Back from the war, the soldier
discovers, home is no longer home as he had known it.
More subtly than does “ Up in Michigan, ” “ Cat in the Rain ” presents a crisis in the
emotional needs of a young woman. The story is set in Europe. On vacation, presum-
ably, a young American man reads in bed, while his wife (presumably) looks out at
a cat caught in the rain. She leaves the room intending to get the cat, but by the time
she gets outside, the cat is gone. Later the hotelkeeper, having witnessed her unsuc-
cessful search, sends her another cat, “ a big tortoise - shell ” one. The woman ’ s need for
a cat, while her husband lies in bed, suggests what is missing in their relationship;
so too does her attraction to the hotelkeeper, expressed in the author ’ s characteristic
style of repetition and syntactical variation in short sentences: “ He stood behind his
desk in the far end of the dim room. The wife liked him. She liked the deadly serious
A Companion to the American Short Story Page 50