“The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” (1925)

This story by Ernest Hemingway works as a kind of counterpoint to his “Indian Camp” story from the same In Our Time collection. Where Nick Adams’s father the doctor is competent and even heroic in “Indian Camp,” here he is petty and irrational, though it’s not entirely clear why. He wants some logs that have washed up on his riverfront to be cut up for firewood. The man coming to do that with a crew makes a point of saying the doctor is stealing the property of a logging company. He says it doesn’t matter to him, but he still insists on the point. This in turn enrages the doctor, who basically tells him to get the hell out of there. It’s apparent there’s something between these two men but we don’t learn in this story what it is. The doctor tells his wife one thing. It could be the source of the rancor—it wouldn’t be unreasonable—but the story seems to imply he’s just telling his wife something to keep her from asking more questions. Then he goes off into the woods looking for Nick, who is reading a book. Nick likes to tag along on his father’s calls. This is another very short story—and similarly prefaced in the collection with a “Chapter II” paragraph about war—and it is another packed full with incident. It suggests typical frictions in a community, how people who know each other so well get along or don’t get along. Whatever is between the two men is probably not that interesting. These little frictions rarely are. They are more often just litanies of slights that have grown into resentments and hostility. The doctor seems much more peevish than our view of him in “Indian Camp.” But he’s still a hero to Nick. Both stories remind me of what I liked most about Hemingway in the first place—readable, plainspoken, but full of sneaky complexity. I also (sometimes) like the artistic pretensions of the lone paragraphs or prose poems floating between stories. I recognize them as pretentious, under influence of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein and such, but they work about as often as they don’t. “Indian Camp” is probably the better story, but I like the deliberate way this story interacts with that one. The constant is the father-son relationship, even as much else about the doctor seems to change. We’ll see how far this goes, but for the moment I’m relieved and happy to find stories so plainly good by Hemingway. He is finding his voice here in a very pure way, albeit a voice I came to think much less of. I’m almost ready for another visit to The Old Man and the Sea.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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