“The Battler” (1925)

Here’s another good one by Ernest Hemingway from the In Our Time collection(s)—actually a late-breaking substitute for “Up in Michigan” when a publisher got squeamish. It seems to be set in Michigan, but the scene is different. Nick Adams has just been tossed from a freight train he jumped on. He’s been riding the rails. It’s too early for the Great Depression as such, but it has much of that violence—just as the 1920s had much of the same financial woes for many agricultural and other workers. It’s striking how much this feels like a Depression story now. Nick makes his way to a campfire he sees going in the woods by the railroad track. He meets a man who notices Nick’s black eye and torn clothes and seems to like the fighting spirit they suggest. He turns out to be a boxer whose name Nick knows. Now down on his luck, obviously, and we learn why later in the story. Another man shows up who is more or less the boxer’s minder. The third man is African-American, and the story is not without its problems regarding him. I hold Hemingway responsible for turning the slave Jim in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn into “N-word Jim,” which has stuck even though Twain himself never used that term. It’s possible it would be useful to look at each use in this story of “negro” and the N-word to see if Hemingway intended any kind of useful distinction. But I suspect not. There is some unpleasant racism in his first novel as well, The Sun Also Rises (1926). My sense is more that Hemingway was a hostile racist. But that said, his portrayal of the unfortunately named Bugs is not insensitive. Bugs is interesting, complex, fully formed, and the most competent person here. It’s a little surprising to see Nick so loose in the world, riding the rails and brawling. I like the dynamics between these characters. We already know Nick but the other two are impressively vivid. The boxer is closer to cliché maybe with the mental problems that make him alarmingly violent and alarmingly quick to turn on someone. The story remains problematic because of the race issues but it’s still also very good.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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