“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 Gertrude Stein told him she thought it was pointless whether it was good or not because she knew it could not be published.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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Listen to story online.

"The Terrible Old Man" (1921)

This very short H.P. Lovecraft story alas comes with the usual note of xenophobe panic, the insidious feature you are never far from with him. In this case, the specific miscreants are named Angelo Ricci, Joe Czanek, and Manuel Silva, so we know where they're coming from. Never mind how, in 1921, one Italian, one Eastern European, and one Latino—swarthy babbling immigrants all, no doubt—have come to be allied in crime. (Or, as they say on the internet, "Sounds legit!") The story is so short it might be fair to call it a short-short, which is refreshing from the normally prolix Lovecraft, who still manages to be ponderous even in the brief space here. It's actually intended as homage to Lord Dunsany, which is a nice idea, but few, of course, are as good at this kind of thing as the canny Irish aristocrat. The trio of America-destroying immigrants here are determined to rob a grizzled old sea captain who lives in a shack on the outskirts of a small New England town. He is the "Terrible Old Man" (Lovecraft's capitalization), "so old that no one can remember when he was young, and so taciturn that few know his real name." The three are convinced the old creaker's house is full of treasure from the sea and also that he is feeble. They are wrong, however, at least about his being feeble, and the charm of the story is how powerful this Terrible Old Man actually appears to be, in his wonderfully unassuming muttering way, most of it off-stage. It's Lovecraft doing Lord Dunsany, but it's still Lovecraft, so for example there's a lot of unseemly shrieking that goes down in the violation itself. Lovecraft the author wants us to think it's the old man being tortured, but we know better, and sure enough, it's the trio who come to a swift and dreadful end. "Little things make considerable excitement in little towns, which is the reason that Kingsport people talked all that spring about the three unidentifiable bodies, horribly slashed as with many cutlasses, and horribly mangled as by the tread of many cruel bootheels, which the tide washed in." No one, naturally, has noticed that three immigrants went missing, because no one in a Lovecraft story cares about immigrants except to hate them. It would be a better story without the overt bigotry, which is a main thing Lord Dunsany understood better. I appreciate Lovecraft paying respects, even in his limited way, and it's not a bad story if you can get past the sour notes. But you're better off going directly to Lord Dunsany.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
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"Marriage a la Mode" (1921)

Read story by Katherine Mansfield online.

Katherine Mansfield is a writer originally from New Zealand, a short story specialist later associated with D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, and a distinctly modern voice. This story, in which no one has pie with ice cream, probes at the dynamics of a marriage growing stale with familiarity and age. William and Isabel are approaching middle age, with two children in grade school. He commutes to a job in London that is demanding, with long hours. She has recently found new friends who are shallow and foolish but fashionable. She finds herself growing apart from him. The story turns on epiphanies occasioned by William traveling to spend a day and a night with his family and Isabel's new friends. The couple has recently moved to a larger house in the countryside, which Isabel wanted. For William it has made his commute even harder, his time with his family even more limited. He is too busy with his work to give much thought to gifts for his children on his visits, and he feels guilty. When he arrives at the station, Isabel is there to get him with her friends. On the one hand he is happy she has come for him, but on the other, she is wrapped in the armor of her friends' posturing. They are a familiar type of 20th-century European upper-class wastrel, with no concerns for anyone and happy to use all who will let them. They make charming empty statements and mostly ignore William, which goes on for most of his visit. He's so disturbed by the way he's treated that he composes a letter to Isabel on the train back to the city—a searching, heartfelt letter about the state of their marriage. When it arrives, Isabel is with her friends and reads it aloud to them. "A love-letter!" they exclaim. "But how divine!" We never hear much of the letter verbatim, we just imagine what's in it based on their reactions. While her friends are hilarious, Isabel has a strange response. At first she makes fun of it with the others—she reads it to them, after all. But then she has an attack of remorse, takes the letter to her bedroom, and reflects on its gravity. She knows it's serious. She knows she must make a decision. She intends to make the recommitment to her husband. But then her friends call to her and she quickly readjusts again. She can write to William later. "And, laughing in the new way, she ran down the stairs." I love that "the new way."

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine