“Indian Camp” (1924)

This story brings us to the somewhat confusing welter of the In Our Time collection featuring Nick Adams, with its multiple versions and quasi-sense of being more than just a collection of short stories, on the order of some kind of interconnected cycle. My version (from the Finca Vigia Complete edition) is prefaced by a single paragraph labeled “Chapter 1” with a war scene. One of these vignettes shows up between every story. I’m more prone to take the stories as standalones and the vignettes as unrelated prose poetry flourishes. “Indian Camp” is very short and very good. It’s the first appearance of Nick Adams, seen here in Michigan as a kid. He is accompanying his father, a doctor, on a late-night call. The occasion is a problem childbirth for a Native American woman. The baby is coming out feet first and ultimately the doctor has to perform a caesarean using a jackknife and no anesthetic. The husband, meanwhile, in the upper bunk, has killed himself by slashing his own throat. He’s not discovered until after the birth. There’s blood everywhere. The brutality here surprised me, but what is perhaps more surprising is that little about it feels overdone. It comes close, and some might disagree. The suicide was particularly gruesome. The doctor hurries Nick out of the cabin, sorry now that he brought him. In general, the story is racist toward Native Americans, but more by way of ignorance than hate. Certainly Nick is getting a life lesson out of this—about life and death, about men and women, about whites and minorities and the realities of poverty. It’s Nick’s point of view through the story. Much of the focus is on the father and son relationship as the father provides a stream of soothing explanations about the situation, at least until the point when it becomes clear what he has to do. We learn about the jackknife in a conversational aside later. Hemingway’s self-serious tone works well here. The best Hemingway—even including some of the vignettes—bears a sense of dismay and devastation, as if captured at the moment innocence is shattered. He often seems to prize stoicism above all else in the face of calamity, but it’s apparent he’s trying to protect the side of himself that believes in the goodness of humanity and life. As must we all. At the same time, a more cynical side of him appears to believe everything is worth nothing, and thus the basic internal conflict of Hemingway. He is just starting to discover it in these Nick Adams stories from In Our Time, which can be gripping, vital, and immediate. The suicide here may be a slightly false note, reaching too far to make an impact, but it’s not hard for me to believe these events could have all happened just this way. The story is shocking but poignant and altogether done well.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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