A Companion to the American Short Story
Page 53
The Hemingway Story
239
Return, ” both published in magazines as short stories but later incorporated into the
novel To Have and Have Not . To these were added new stories edited from manuscript.
Some, “ Landscape with Figures, ” “ I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something ”
(about a father and son), “ Great News from the Mainland ” (another father and son
story), and “ Black Ass at the Cross Roads, ” were identifi ed as short stories. Others,
such as “ A Train Trip, ” “ The Porter, ” and “ The Strange Country ” were identifi ed as
excerpts (of several chapters, in some instances) from unfi nished novels. But some
published work is excluded – “ The Mercenaries, ” “ Crossroads, ” and “ The Ash Heel ’ s
Tendon ” (early stories included in Peter Griffi n ’ s 1990 biography, Along with Youth ),
two anecdotes told to the
“
Old Lady
”
in
Death in the Afternoon , and high - school
juvenilia. 8
In his last years Hemingway prepared a book - length manuscript of reminiscences
of his Parisian years in the 1920s. Published posthumously, A Moveable Feast was
edited, in part, by his widow, Mary Welsh Hemingway, whom he had married in
1946, shortly after divorcing his third wife, Martha Gellhorn. Included is a preface
by Hemingway, dated “ San Francisco de Paula, Cuba 1960, ” in which he writes: “ For
reasons suffi cient to the writer, many places, people, observations and impressions
have been left out of this book. Some were secrets and some were known by everyone
and everyone has written about them and will doubtless write more ” (in mode the
work is memorial). But that it is entirely a record of what actually happened, however
selective, is called into question by the sentences which conclude this short preface.
“ If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fi ction, ” offers the author, who
continues, slyly cautioning, “ but there is always the chance that such a book of fi ction
may throw some light on what has been written as fact ” ( Moveable v). Only the names
of persons and places are real, he might have said, the incidents making up the nar-
rative are imaginary – perhaps. If one chooses not to disregard the implications of
Hemingway ’ s prefatory statements, one is then confronted with the interesting pos-
sibilities in how to regard, describe, and assess the work. It can, of course, be regarded
as a book of sketches and portraits deriving from remembered facts, described as a
memoir, and evaluated for its fi delity to observation and its reliability as record. It is
replete with acidic and not so acidic pictures of by - now historical personages such as
Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and
Hadley Richardson Hemingway. But consider for a moment this possibility: suppose
Hemingway had substituted fi ctitious names for the real ones, as he had in the fi nal
version of The Sun Also Rises , that earlier account of Paris (and Spain) in the 1920s,
would there be any point in denying that in A Moveable Feast he had written his fi nal
collection of short stories? Once again (as always, but particularly in In Our Time ) he
has combined fully developed stories ( “ A Matter of Measurements ” ), paired stories
( “ Miss Stein Instructs ” and “ ‘ Une G é n é ration Perdue ’ ” ) and sketches ( “ Shakespeare and Company ” ) within a structure that successfully conveys an archetypal story of the loss
of a golden age, of a young artist ’ s fall from a second innocence. It is less an account
of a young man ’ s adventures than a portrait of the man as young artist. Much of what
Hemingway is up to in A Moveable Feast he reveals in the opening story, “ A Good
240
George Monteiro
Caf é on the Place St. - Michel. ” This simple, direct narrative moves from an account
of “ bad weather, ” “ a sad, evilly run caf é ” (3), and the dirty and sour smells of certain
parts of Paris to a dramatized episode in “ a pleasant caf é , warm and clean and friendly ”
(5), where the author takes a notebook out of his pocket and a pencil and writes a
story. It turns out that the story he writes is one his readers will recognize as “ The
Three Day Blow. ” He tells us that since, on the day he writes, “ it was a wild, cold,
blowing day it was that sort of day in the story ” (5). Moreover, the boys in the story
were drinking and this made the author so thirsty he ordered “ a rum St. James. ” “ This
tasted wonderful on the cold day, ” he writes, “ and I kept on writing, feeling very well
and feeling the good Martinique rum warm me all through my body and my spirit ”
(5). When he looks up from his notebook, he watches a very pretty girl with hair as
“ black as a crow ’ s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek ” (5). He
wishes that he could put her into the story he is writing, but he cannot. She must
wait her turn until, thirty - fi ve years later, she surfaces in the story we are now reading.
If “ A Good Cafe on the Place St. - Michel ” does not reveal the mysteries of good
writing, Hemingway does tell the reader that the facts of memory are only one ingre-
dient, sensitivity to immediate experience and present ambience being equally impor-
tant. This story, leading off the collection, serves to caution the reader of A Moveable
Feast not to take incidents, events, and characters therein displayed as strictly adhering
to what actually happened at the time, but as instances, it may be, of a higher, fi ctional
truth. It is an artist ’ s tenet, one that Hemingway would have his readers apply to all
the writing he cared about. He was always pleased, as he said elsewhere, that critics,
when trying to distinguish those stories he invented from those he had transcribed
from actuality and memory, seldom did so accurately. His stories were of both kinds.
He wrote some stories “ absolutely as they happen, ” he claimed – “ Wine of Wyoming, ”
“ One Reader Writes, ” “ A Day ’ s Wait, ” “ The Mother of a Queen, ” “ The Gambler, the
Nun, and the Radio, ” and “ After the Storm ” – while others he invented – “ The
Killers, ” “ Hills Like White Elephants, ” “ The Undefeated, ” “ Fifty Grand, ” “ The Sea
Change, ” and “ A Simple Enquiry. ” “ Nobody can tell, ” he boasted, “ which ones I make
up completely ” ( Letters 400).
The author ’ s purpose, in any and every instance, was to create his narrative such
that the places and personages he rendered would be truer to his readers than their
own actuality. The problem, though, as the author saw it, was that critics were invari-
ably too ready to read the author ’ s biography directly out of his fi ction. In A Moveable
Feast he turns their question around: he challenges them not to look for the actuality
behind the stories but, if they will look for such things, the invention that went into
them. If Hemingway wanted all the stories in In Our Time , for instance, “ to sound as
though they really happened ” (400), can it not be said of the stories of actuality in A
Moveable Feast that he wanted them all to sound as though they were really invented?
This melding of fact and fi
ction in Hemingway ’ s best writing has always interested
his readers. In the end it did not much matter to him or, for the most part, to his
readers. After all, dissolving the boundaries between imagined reality and recorded
imagination enabled him to write A Moveable Feast .
The Hemingway Story
241
Hemingway ’ s work remains vital. He was the innovator of an unmatched style, a
shrewd chronicler of his times, a close observer of child and adolescent life, an anato-
mist of pain, courage, and cowardice, and a poet of aging and death. He liberated the
American short story from the constrictions imposed by the plot
-
driven formula
culminating in a fi nal wry twist that marked so many American stories in the early
decades of the twentieth century. Rather than playing up to the smaller ironies in
single incidents (the so - called O. Henry ending), Hemingway ’ s stories delineate a
world in which the fact of human existence is itself discovered to be inherently ironic.
Of the short stories Hemingway most cared about, which included both the
recalled and invented sort, we have his own list. In his preface to the First Forty - Nine
Stories , excluding those stories he considered even then to have been overly antholo-
gized ( “ The Undefeated, ” “ Fifty Grand, ” “ The Killers ” among them, one surmises),
he names seven: “ The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, ” “ In Another Country, ”
“ Hills Like White Elephants, ” “ A Way You ’ ll Never Be, ” “ The Snows of Kiliman-
jaro, ” “ A Clean Well - Lighted Place, ” and “ The Light of the World. ” His readers
would undoubtedly add other titles to this list ( “ Indian Camp ” and “ Soldier ’ s Home, ”
for example), but none, one surmises, would omit any of those named by Hemingway,
a clutch of stories that rank undeniably among the fi nest and most infl uential in the
English language. Writers such as J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Oscar
Hijuelos, Raymond Carver, Antonio Lobo Antunes, and Joyce Carol Oates, to name
only a few that come readily to mind, have acknowledged their indebtedness to
Hemingway. But let the last word go to a contemporary writer in Brazil. In an inter-
view published in 2002, over forty years after Hemingway ’ s death, Ana Maria Machado
was asked to name those writers “ from other countries ” who had infl uenced her. “ At
age nineteen, I discovered John Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and
Hemingway, ” she answered. “ From these last two I ’ ve read all they have written many
times over. It was pure passion, especially Hemingway, whom I consider one of that
very select group of writers who have thoroughly mastered their craft. He is a writer
I would like to emulate someday; his ability to give voice to the land, whether in
Pamplona, the Gulf of Mexico or Africa, is truly astonishing. He is so humble amid
nature, and his quietness allows nature to speak for itself in his works. ” 9
Notes
1 Selected Letters of John O ’ Hara , ed. Matthew J.
outstanding author out of the millions of
Bruccoli (New York: Random House, 1978),
writers who have lived since 1616 ” ( New York
348. In 1950 O ’ Hara had evoked a fl urry of
Times Book Review , September 10, 1950: 1).
protest when he wrote: “ The most important
2
Quotations from Hemingway ’ s stories come
author living today, the outstanding author
from The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Heming-
since the death of Shakespeare, has brought out
way
, The Finca Vig
í
a Edition (New York:
a new novel. The title of the novel is Across the
Scribner ’ s, 1987 ).
River and Into the Trees . The author, of course,
3
D. H. Lawrence, Review of In Our Time , Cal-
is Ernest Hemingway, the most important, the
endar of Modern Letters 4 (April 1927): 72 – 3.
242
George Monteiro
4
Scribner ’ s followed Philip Young ’ s plan for the
in the wire, with a fl are lighting him up and
book, but decided not to use his critical intro-
his bowels spilled out into the wire, so when
duction, preferring a much shorter preface; see
they brought him in, alive, they had to cut
Philip Young,
“
Big World Out There: The
him loose. Shoot me, Harry. For Christ sake
shoot me. They had had an argument one
Nick Adams Stories, ” Novel: A Forum on Fiction ,
time about our Lord never sending you
6 (Fall 1972): 5
–
19, and
“
Posthumous
anything you could not bear and some one ’ s
Hemingway, and Nicholas Adams, ” in Heming-
theory had been that meant that a certain
way In Our Time
, eds. Richard Astro and
time the pain passed you out automatically.
Jackson J. Benson (Corvallis: Oregon State
But he had always remembered Williamson,
University Press, 1974), 13
–
23. As early as
that night. Nothing passed out Williamson
1930 Granville Hicks asserted that any study
until he gave him all his morphine tablets
of Hemingway
’
s portrayal of the
“
spiritual
that he had always saved to use himself and
history
”
of the hero must start with Nick
then they did not work right away. (53)
Adams (
“
The World of Hemingway,
”
New
8
Two additional stories, “ Philip Haines Was a
Freeman 1, March 1930: 40 – 2).
Writer ” and “ Lack of Passion, ” edited from
5
This epigraph appears on the title - page of all
manuscript, appeared in the Spring 1990 issue
editions of Winner Take Nothing but is absent
of The Hemingway Review (9: 1 – 93).
from the collective editions of Hemingway ’ s
9
Glauco Ortolano, “ An Interview with Ana
stories.
Maria Machado, ” WLT: World Literature Today ,
6
It is Maxwell Perkins ’ s warning that Carlos
76 (Spring 2002): 112. Best known for her
Baker quotes in Ernest Hemingway, A Life Story
children ’ s books, Ana Maria Machado has done
(New York: Scribner ’ s, 1969), 241.
distinguished work in several literary genres.
7
Typical of Harry ’ s fi nal “ stories, ” echoing the
The range of writers infl uenced by Hemingway
content and style of the sketches Hemingway
is further suggested by the admiration of the
fi rst published in in our time and incorporated
novelist James Lee Burke, who lists Heming-
into In Our Time , is the following:
way
’
s collected stories among his top fi ve
books from which “ to le
arn style and the cre-
He remembered long ago when Williamson,
ation of character
”
and that of the mystery
the bombing offi cer, had been hit by a stick
novelist Robert B. Parker, the creator of the
bomb some one in a German patrol had
private eye Spencer, who lists Hemingway
thrown as he was coming in through the wire
that night and, screaming, had begged every
among his major infl uences, “ particularly the
one to kill him. He was a fat man, very brave,
short stories ” – The Reader ’ s Companion , com-
and a good offi cer, although addicted to fan-
piled by Fred Bratman and Scott Lewis (New
tastic shows. But that night he was caught
York: Hyperion, 1994), 36, 48.
References and Further Reading
Beegel , Susan F. , ed. Hemingway ’
s Neglected Short
— — — . Hemingway ’ s Nick Adams . Baton Rouge :
Fiction: New Perspectives . Tuscaloosa : University
Louisiana State University Press , 1982 .
of Alabama Press , 1992 .
— — — .
Reading Hemingway
’ s
Men Without
Benson , Jackson J. , ed. New Critical Approaches to
Women: Glossary and Commentary . Kent, OH :
the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway . Durham,
Kent State University Press , 2008 .
NC : Duke University Press , 1990 .
Hemingway , Ernest . Three Stories and Ten Poems .
DeFalco , Joseph . The Hero in Hemingway
’ s Short
Paris : Contact , 1923 .
Stories . Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh
— — — . in our time . Paris : Three Mountains Press ,
Press , 1963 .
1924 .
Flora , Joseph M. Ernest Hemingway: A Study of the
— — — . In Our Time . New York : Boni & Liveright ,
Short Fiction . Boston : Twayne , 1989 .
1925 .
The Hemingway Story
243
— — — . Men Without Women . New York : Scribner ,
— — — . The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Heming-
1927 .
way
(The Finca Vig
í
a Edition).
New York
:
— — — . Winner Take Nothing . New York : Scrib-
Scribner , 1987 .