“Up in Michigan” (1921)

This early Ernest Hemingway story has something of a complicated history. Among other things it’s often given as revised by Hemingway in 1938 but I can’t find much about what the revisions entailed. It’s a very short story about a date rape in a small town in Michigan. That was the point of it when he wrote it and that’s what it remains. It’s a sharp, vivid, heartless story. In 1921 it was universally considered unpublishable. Gertrude Stein told him she thought it was pointless whether it was good or not because she knew it could not be published. Sure enough, it was left out of Hemingway’s first collection of stories, In Our Time, because the publisher considered it objectionable. Ralph Maughan over at Goodreads makes a good point. “Some reviewers mistake this description of sexist behavior as approval of sexist behavior,” he writes. “It is quite the opposite.” Yes, maybe. Considering what we know about Hemingway, and considering the tongue-in-cheek title which he joked about, approval of sexist behavior is not entirely out of the question. To be fair, I don’t really see that in the story. But there is certainly some sense that the waitress Liz Coates is naïve at best, “asking for it” at worst, blinded by her infatuation with the blacksmith Jim Gilmore. The story strikes me as true enough to reality in many ways, especially with the feelings of Liz, approximated as they are from Hemingway’s decidedly male point of view. It feels honest, like a story Hemingway may have heard from a woman. There is also a whole other side to the story of this story, as many of the manuscripts for Hemingway’s early stories were lost in the early ‘20s. A lot of the stories in In Our Time thus had to be rewritten from scratch. This one survived because it was not packed into the lost suitcase with the others, perhaps because he'd got enough feedback to know it wasn’t going to get published. But it did survive and may give some sense of what was lost. There’s not much dispute about how good the reconstructed stories are. In fact, it’s a little scary to think they might have been better, fresher. It may be strange, or even perverse, but I think this is as good a place as any to start with Hemingway’s short stories, arguably some of the best written in the 20th century, and certainly enormously influential, even still to some degree. “Up in Michigan” has to have some of the features of his lost writing and it’s also presumably burnished with the 1930s pass. His novels were getting steadily worse by 1938 but he still knew how to make passages shine. I’m glad we seem to have grown past finding this story objectionable rather than the events it depicts. It’s done with honesty, narrative force, and just good writing.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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