“The Old Man and the Sea” (1952)

“The Old Man and the Sea” was a kind of media event unto itself, Ernest Hemingway’s “last major fictional work published during his lifetime” (Wikipedia), published in its entirety first in the glamorous Life magazine with a photo of the author all over the ding-dang cover. It won a Pulitzer and “was the only work explicitly mentioned when Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.” The obvious comparisons and perhaps the ambitions too are stuff like Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, William Faulkner’s “The Bear,” Jack London’s Call of the Wild. If it ranks behind all of them that still puts it within range of Mount Rushmore status, for those inclined. The novella also rates comparison with Hemingway’s own “Big Two-Hearted River” in the way that it basically just observes. It feels more labored and exhausted but it’s still a reasonably good last gasp. The arc of the story—physically, literally—is out to the deep waters of the Gulf Stream from Cuba and back again. It is as simple (and Hemingwayesque) as it could be, all detail focused on what the old man fisherman must do next with his resources and skills as situations develop. As admirably as it may be done there’s little we haven’t seen from Hemingway before. There was a lot of sideline chatter at the time about writer’s block and weak recent novels. A lot was on the line commercially. Its sheer competence was greeted with relief by those under his influence. Later, more carping reviews began to complain of bonehead simplicity and other sins. I read this when I loved Hemingway very much, at 19 or 20, and swore by its straightforward compaction. More recently I didn’t find it as breezy and readable. It’s certainly straightforward and simple, but I was more bored this time by all the MacGyver making-do antics. Yes, yes, life and death, but the references to baseball seemed notably strained. All my problems with Hemingway’s valorization of the stoic are here. It’s what he does. I don’t think “The Old Man and the Sea” lives up to all the attention—a lot of what made it a big deal are more like sideline issues. So it’s hard to know what to make of it, but it’s probably as good a place as any to end a consideration of Hemingway’s shorter fiction. I probably missed a few from the ‘30s, ‘40s, maybe even ‘50s.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.
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“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936)

This story by Ernest Hemingway takes place on an African safari, which is not promising. Then it gets into Hemingway’s moralizing about courage and integrity, which is even less so. It doesn’t help, reading the story nowadays, that big game hunting has become something much more painfully perverse, especially if the game is animals in dwindling populations. But this story somehow still works with its shocking scenes and revelations. It’s a hunting party of three: a rich fool, his wife, and their guide. The guide is the obvious Hemingway hero and/or stand-in, stoic and judgmental and above it all by right of his own excellence. The rich fool, who is paying for all this, has already committed the act that brands him a coward before the story begins, earlier that day. He turned and ran from an approaching lion. The guide had to bring it down and it turned into a messy kill. Some of us might be more inclined to call turning around and running away prudent, and a lot of us think they shouldn’t even have been there in the first place, even in 1936. Take the coward thing as given, it leads to severe humiliations for the rich guy. He and his wife are not getting along. She takes the opportunity of his shame to sneak into the guide’s tent for a few hours that night. The infidelity is so blatant I’m not sure you can even call it deception. These two events may (or may not) seem unlikely if you think about them but they work in the story, casting an awful pall. The story finishes on a third terrible event, just as extreme and unlikely, as the rich guy is charged by an African buffalo the next day. There has been an incident that morning in which his cowardice was redeemed. But, apparently, it’s just some illusion, as ultimately true nature cannot forgive him, or something. Or his wife, who gets him in the head trying for the buffalo (or was she?). I don’t know. It worked for me at the same time I was moaning and groaning about all these hypermasculine rites and rules and all the immutability of it. It does get tiresome. But this story is done pretty well and worked for me in spite of all that. It’s moving in a number of ways. And I don’t mind the arrogant contempt the guide has for the rich couple, who remind me of Tom and Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby. No doubt unconscious on Hemingway’s part.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933)

James Joyce once said this is one of the best stories ever written, so Ernest Hemingway can’t really be blamed for saying it “might” be his favorite. When I first encountered it as a young man in the throes of Hemingway infatuation, I thought even the title was great—no need for a story. What I expected is how I tend to remember it, although it’s not even close. I thought it had something to do with finding a good place in public to write. But not at all. Instead, it is a strange Parisian café scene at night, involving two waiters closing it up and their last customer, an elderly man deaf and at least 80 years old. He is a regular at this café. He recently attempted suicide. One waiter is impatient for him to leave, but the older waiter is more philosophical. The old man is drinking his fill of brandy. The story has a funny look as it lays on the page, partly telling the story itself that way. Normal and large blocks of text in some paragraphs (notably a long one near the end) alternate with blasts of dialogue in short, rapid sentences. Attributions drop away as two interlocutors converse, usually the two waiters. Hemingway is skillful enough to keep it lucid—it’s rare to lose track of who is speaking. A good deal is made of the differences between bars, bodegas, and cafes. The preference among the soul-tormented here (the old man and the older waiter) is the “clean, well-lighted” café. Bars require too much standing. The young and impatient waiter has a wife waiting for him at home. Late in the story we learn the older waiter is insomniac and does not expect to sleep until daylight. The café closes between 2 and 4 a.m., apparently depending on when the last customer finishes. Joyce said this story “reduced the veil between literature and life, which is what every writer strives to do.” Maybe so, but I have to admit I’m not entirely feeling it. I love the title and generally how Hemingway can do more with less. His subtraction method doesn’t always work—it doesn’t always work here—but it’s an interesting way to approach fiction and can certainly make it rich in unspoken implications. But I haven’t lived a life that includes very much that seems to be happening in this story, as someone who generally shuns bars and cafes as places to go aimlessly and hang around for human company.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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“In Another Country” (1927)

After the longish “The Undefeated” in Ernest Hemingway’s second collection of stories, Men Without Women, most of the stories are short and even micro-sized. This one goes five pages. It’s a war story but set in a hospital, where our unnamed main character and first-person narrator is recovering from wounds. The war was obviously a horrific, traumatizing experience for Hemingway—in many ways these stories are about untreated PTSD. Perhaps hard to believe, but they are going on a century old and in many ways it shows. We just think of PTSD differently now—they didn’t think about it much then, with vaguely derisive terms for it like “shellshock.” Hemingway struggled with these mental and psychological problems in a time when people were not very sympathetic, considering them signs of weakness. He bought into that himself to some degree. Much of his work is marred by mawkish repressed self-pity. That said, this story is not one of the worst examples. I like the hospital scenes and the sense of both the war and the detachment from it in the hospital. First line, a good one: “In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.” Perfect! However, the story, such as it is, involves another man getting treatment at the hospital. It turns out his wife died recently and unexpectedly. So it’s a heavy-handed irony. The husband survived a war wound but his wife died from pneumonia and/or the influenza pandemic no one ever seems to talk about in literature. The widower erupts randomly with the narrator, telling him he must never marry, and later apologizes for his outbursts. That’s when we learn about the death of the man’s wife. So, yes, losing a partner is a great tragedy—and often a good story. But it feels more like a device here and somewhat clumsy. The war is terrible and it’s not talked about particularly in those terms. The pandemic is terrible and not talked about at all. The wife’s death is understood as terrible but that’s only as far as it goes. No one is really dealing with anything here, which we are given to understand is the human condition. Maybe in 1927! Not now (I hope). In the past I liked this story more for its concision, and this “iceberg” sense there is much more under the surface than what we see. Now the repressed behavior annoys me more. At a certain point there is little to say about the tragedies of others. You can only witness them. But is that really what Hemingway is doing here?

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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“Hills Like White Elephants” (1927)

Just because the 1927 Ernest Hemingway collection is called Men Without Women doesn’t mean we’re going to get any stories without women, and here we are. The story is good, or not bad, but the values it puts out are terrible, repugnant. It’s another very short story—four printed pages—and involves a conversation between a man and a woman who are traveling together and waiting at a station for a train. They are having drinks. There is something between them—it’s likely she is pregnant and they are talking about an abortion, but the story is never explicit on the point, which is annoying. I mean, I’m pretty sure what’s going on here, but the third-person narrator is never clear enough for me. It feels stupidly coy. But it’s clear enough. He wants her to get an abortion and she doesn’t want to. She would prefer to marry but it doesn’t seem to be an option for him. All speculation on my part. This is one story where the whole “iceberg” thing goes awry. The wrong things are revealed. Too much is not disclosed. The narrator has an unexplained hostile attitude toward the woman. She is referred to as a girl and she seems to be behaving petulantly and immaturely. What the story doesn’t seem to understand at all, or at least not very well, is that this man is a jerk. The way I read it, he wants her to get an abortion and he doesn’t want her to bear his child. He obviously doesn’t care what she thinks, how she feels, or what she wants. He doesn’t want to talk about it at all. It’s infuriating to me and completely explains her behavior. Of course I have some sympathy for the guy’s position. Who among us has not wanted to eat their cake and have it too? But he is at least as petulant and immature as her. I’m not sure the story, or the narrator—or Hemingway—is aware of it. In terms of the mechanics of the story, yes, I have to admit it’s pretty good. The setting and the moment are well conceived and the story is carried by majority dialogue. It could be a one-act play. It’s poignant in its way, at least insofar as it subscribes to old school values that have arguably had their day. But it’s impossible to untangle the virtues of this story from the toxic attitudes. Somehow unfortunately this seems to happen with some frequency with Hemingway.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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“Soldier’s Home” (1925)

[2017 review here]

Another good one from Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time collection, also prefaced by an isolated paragraph with a war scene. At least it was a war scene—they don’t always feel on point. This story is not about Nick Adams but about Harold Krebs, a veteran of the Great War recently discharged and sent home. I don’t know the timeline of PTSD stories, but this certainly counts as one and may be an early one—it feels more like a Vietnam-era story in many ways. Krebs—not otherwise seen in Hemingway’s fiction as far as I know—was held over and not sent home until 1919, missing all the parades and such. Now he doesn’t want to do anything. The story feels so modern on this point that TV itself (not generally available in 1925) feels missing in action. There’s also some vibe from the movie The Best Years of Our Lives, with family and friends at home trying to help but not knowing how—arguably not even able because they weren’t there. All that is in Krebs without Hemingway having to spell it out. The title is a little double-jointed, playing off an ambiguous apostrophe, signifying a home that belongs to the soldier and also that the soldier has arrived there. The story is burdened and foredoomed with the certain sense it is true about homecomings from war, the confusing sense of being lost that the returning have. They have changed—they have aged. They don’t understand and rage dogs anyone trying to engage them. There are no real eruptions here. When Krebs’s mother presses him on his next step it is tense but ultimately uneventful. He decides to move to Kansas City, less a decision and more just a response to his mother’s pressure. In turn that’s more about the silent, absent father’s pressure. Krebs’s one point about leaving for Kansas City is he hopes he can skip a scene with his father that way. A good no-nonsense story about aimlessness and desperation and the stupid futility of war.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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“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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“Cat in the Rain” (1925)

A lot of people have made a lot of things out of this very short story by Ernest Hemingway. Wikipedia uses it to talk about an “iceberg theory” of literature, in which a story shows the 10% that’s above the surface while also somehow suggesting the 90% of it hidden below. This story works pretty well that way, in spite of being obviously another one of Hemingway’s marriages / wives. It’s raining, and the woman, the wife of the American couple at the Italian hotel, sees a kitten outside their hotel crouched under a table and wants it for the companionship. So much depends upon it,  But it is elusive. At story’s end a maid knocks on their door with a cat in arms for her. Others see the story as related to wanting or having children. That’s fair. Another theme discussed is that she’s lonely because her husband (Hemingway) abandons her to his writing every day for hours and she doesn’t have anything to do. He is somewhat neglectful. Sadly, that sounds the most like Hemingway to me and thus the most plausible interpretation. I like it best as literally about a cat in the rain who is rescued, as we say now. A cat that has found its forever home with a woman or couple who will always take care of it. Never mind that Hemingway and this particular wife, Hadley, lost all or most of his literary work to that point when a suitcase went missing. Now a somewhat overblown legend, it does remind that literally lost writing can be debilitating. I have my own examples from the early days of word processing, when hours of work could be lost by accidentally pressing the wrong key. This story may be a little too typical of Hemingway in some ways (the stoic writer at his poetic work) but I just stubbornly like the cat story and that’s all there is to it. I won’t hear of it any other way. I suspect I may sound dismissive of Hemingway’s imagist impulses, but they do generally work and that includes this story very much. (The preface paragraph, on the other hand, is another bullfighting scene. Again, works well. Again, I'm not interested in bullfighting.) The cat scenes are better than the marriage scenes, but overall it’s another good Hemingway story by all the usual rules of judgment.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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“Big Two-Hearted River” (pts. I-II, 1925)

Ernest Hemingway had a poet’s touch as well as a poet’s vanity in putting together the In Our Time collection. Many of its stories are very good—this finale to the collection is one of his best, most famous, and most defining. But it is presented as two stories in the Finca Vigia edition, which seems to be scrupulous to Hemingway’s intentions. The “two parts”—is it something about the two hearts?—are interrupted by a prose poem message from our sponsor (also before and after, also between every story in the collection). In this case it is a scene of five men being hanged and thankfully not about bullfighting. Perhaps readers in their time understood the context better than me. Is it a war scene? The writing is concrete and chiseled but what is it doing there? Last time through I tried “Big Two-Hearted River” another way, skipping the in-betweens and just reading it as a single story, where it made much more sense and isn’t that long. Hang some Roman numerals on the two parts and leave it at that, I say. None of this unbecoming monumentality. Not least because “Big Two-Hearted River” is quite a beautiful story and doesn’t need the puffery. I kept thinking of Richard Brautigan and Trout Fishing in America and all the permutations of trout fishing in America because this one (two-part) story has to be the single source of all of them. This is where trout fishing in America becomes iconic. Not, perhaps, that Brautigan necessarily belongs in a discussion of Hemingway, but he certainly spent some time living in this story. In Part I, our old friend Nick Adams is in the wilds of Michigan, returned from travels and war and painful experience, embracing the restorative forest, secure in his meditative outdoors skills. He sets up camp near the river, starts a fire, prepares a meal, makes coffee, remembers a friend, and eventually sleeps. The sense of comfort he finds in these rituals is palpable. In Part II, it’s a day of fishing, with fast water, logs, grasshoppers as bait, water thigh-high in places. A big one gets away but he ends up catching two and knows there will be good fishing for days if he wants. A city slicker such as myself may be slightly alienated by the brutality of the way he kills grasshoppers and fish, as described, but I suppose it’s all in a day’s fishing. There’s symbolism here. The town where he disembarks the train is burnt to the ground. Across the river from where he is fishing the land and water turn into an impenetrable swamp. He is cocooned between them. Maybe the highly formal two parts are supposed to suggest how broken Adams is, but I suggest reading them together and consecutively. It’s kind of mysterious how it works so well—one of those stories.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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“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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“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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“Out of Season” (1923)

This story by Ernest Hemingway is possibly his first under influence of Ezra Pound and Pound’s “imagism,” which attempts to use omission to strengthen the impact or meaning of a poem or story. It’s an intriguing and very Poundian idea. Look at him go in perhaps his most famous poem, “In a Station of the Metro”: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough” (that’s the whole thing; let it tumble in your mind). In many ways Hemingway is just the man for imagism. This story is also the first that Hemingway reconstructed after a suitcase full of manuscripts was stolen. He claimed later this story came back to him quickly. There is some sense in it of laboring to exhaustion (natural enough as he is recreating it), but for the most part I think it works pretty well. Set in Italy after the Great War, it involves a local, Peduzzi, who has signed on to take an American married couple on an illicit fishing expedition. The incidents are fragmented yet potent with suggestion: Noticing a “Fascist café” sets the historical era vividly and economically. Peduzzi, the guide, is working to make the outing as easy for himself as possible yet he also hopes to make as much off the Americans as he can, including, perhaps most importantly, drink. There is tension between the couple. It’s not clear she’s interested in fishing at all, as she lags well behind the two men, carrying the fishing rods and saying very little. The townspeople observing this group seem sullen, as if resenting how the Americans can break the rules with impunity, or perhaps they are envious of Peduzzi. Hemingway is obviously working out his technique. It’s often not subtle or effective at all that things are missing. Yet just as often these things can be felt through the gaps. This story first appeared in a 1923 privately published edition, Three Stories & Ten Poems. By the time it made it into the 1925 edition of the In Our Time collection it was accompanied by vignette paragraphs that alternate with the stories. I don’t always understand the relation of these vignettes to the stories—it’s art, it’s poetry—but “Out of Season” is preceded by one about bullfighting. The first time I read this story that vignette annoyed me and colored my reaction some. A later second reading (minus the vignette) won me over more. A tremendous amount is communicated here by the shattered minimalist approach. It seems strange to me that someone so resolutely masculinist—it’s arguably Hemingway’s greatest influence, and not a good one—is also so tender and studied about his aesthetics.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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“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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"Soldier's Home" (1925)

Read story by Ernest Hemingway online.

Even halfway into this very short story I was pretty sure I would be coming away from it complaining again about Ernest Hemingway's mechanized stoicism and all that implicit machismo. To be sure, those elements are here, and they are as annoying as ever. But there's also something distinctly modern about this, like the stories we hear about soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and before that from Vietnam. But not from Korea, or, before this, from either of the world wars. The stoicism of our hero Krebs, the returning warrior, is palpable, yes, but somehow suffused with dignity and a certain intimidating demeanor. It's not pitiable at all, on a certain level, nor arrogant, except as emotional defense. I don't recall seeing anything like this in Hemingway before. It's one of his early stories, which tended to be his best work. The language is what we've come to expect: a minimum of adjectives, and monolithic paragraphs filled with verbs, nouns, and conjunctions. It's stripped down and clean, but note that the compound clauses can really pile up sometimes. There's machismo, but less in the authorial voice than in the character Krebs, and there it seems for the most part bluster. Yet he's not unsympathetic. More than anything he is opaque, though obviously wounded psychically. It's just that no one knows what to do about it—not Krebs himself, nor anyone around him, nor even the author either evidently. Nowadays we would prescribe time, rest, and psychotherapy, but nowadays we also collectively refuse to follow through on that, leaving our wounded warriors wounded, but thanking them in train stations for their service. I'll give Hemingway the benefit of the doubt that he (sort of) knew the problem, though not what to do about it. That what he did was take the sense of something wrong as his motivation to write, and all the puzzling surface details he saw but could make no sense of as his subject. Hemingway was a journalist first, remember, and in many ways a story like this is just a kind of reporting. Never mind that many sentences here would never get past a copy editor without some judicious attempts for a little more clarity. It's almost better without it. The sense of someone utterly stunned by life is the essence of this story. The soldier has returned to the soldier's home, but the soldier isn't home. Since the war, there's no home for him anywhere.

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

Green Hills of Africa (1935)

I recently read Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway for the first time, but I think I recall my parents might have owned a hardcover copy of it. The illustrations in my paperback—called "decorations"—struck familiar chords anyway. I had the impression it was a novel, but it's actually nonfiction, a travel adventure dressed up in some of the clothes of fiction such as the usual Hemingway alternation between description and dialogue. A brief Foreword condescendingly and somewhat pretentiously implies he is working the territory we now call "creative nonfiction," the "nonfiction novel," and/or "new journalism." To be fair, Hemingway was there long before Truman Capote or Norman Mailer. It's possible to make the case for Green Hills as a species of novel, but chiefly it bears comparison to a Hemingway novel, which does reduce its innovation quotient somewhat. My favorite parts were when he talked about, or showed people talking about, reading and literature. Some of the hunting scenes were good too. But as usual Hemingway's awfully huge ego squats in the middle of everything like an overweight gorilla, and stinks up the joint a little. We are made privy to his petty jealousies over the hunting successes of another, perfectly likable man. Hemingway's squeeze on this safari, unbearably referred to as "P.O.M." (we find out what it stands for at the end, but I've forgotten and looking for it is somehow altogether too depressing), is a case study in what has been called—just as unbearably, I admit—"codependency." It's a creepshow. Now I know I've been complaining a lot about Hemingway's stoic, long-suffering shtick, and I suppose I should be happy he is exposing himself warts and all here. But I'm not. And why? Because he seems determined to depict these character flaws as unchangeable facts of life that must be borne under, delving into overly detailed rationalizations. It's the abuser cycle of eruption and contrition, with no sense that it can be dealt with and changed, or even that it's particularly a problem to be addressed, except confessionally. So we are back to the stoic and long-suffering. Even so, if one can look away from that (and you see it's hard for me), there are many lovely passages here, and I certainly enjoyed it more than my recent revisits to the two more celebrated novels.

In case it's not at the library.

A Moveable Feast (1964/2009)

In 1975, I might have liked A Moveable Feast best of all the books by Ernest Hemingway I read. But among people I knew who disliked him it was singled out for additional revilement for its various self-aggrandizing qualities. So I wasn't sure what to expect many years later, and after disappointments with revisits to two of his more highly regarded novels. As it turns out, my interest in memoir trumped my growing suspicions that Ernest Hemingway is a charlatan, and I enjoyed it as much I had the first time. It's Hemingway's usual wooden-block alternations between description and dialogue, and his usual stoic nonsense, but it's also gossipy and fun, sometimes malicious (notably his acid treatment of Ford Madox Ford, which is cruel). On that score, Hemingway's description alone of a conversation he overheard between Gertrude Stein and, presumably, Alice B. Toklas, makes the book. His memories of F. Scott Fitzgerald are good too, providing views new for me into Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Hemingway's admiration for The Great Gatsby is so sincere and unqualified—he also praises Tender Is the Night, but I have the impression he was almost in awe of Gatsby. I like how Hemingway judges Fitzgerald as a writer, which in turn makes him willing to put himself through the agonies he describes, trying to be Fitzgerald's friend (and remembering always that the first presumption with Hemingway should probably include acknowledging the usual, and obvious, self-aggrandizement, which is real). I also like everything about Ezra Pound here, starting with his very appearance at all. Mostly he comes across as a kind of well-dressed, well-mannered beatnik, which is interesting. Even more interesting, Hemingway omits any discussion at all of Pound's World War II adventures on the side of the Italian Fascists and the consequences suffered.

On the other hand, noting the multiple dates of publication (and also that Ernest Hemingway died in 1961), I think it has to be said that A Moveable Feast is now officially a mess. Hemingway never felt he had it done before he died, and the first edition was the result of his fourth wife Mary's compositing among the fragments. The latest version from 2009, "The Restored Edition," was composited by Sean Hemingway, Ernest's grandson by his second wife, Pauline; among other things, Sean and his father (another of Ernest's sons) felt Pauline was not treated fairly in the first edition. In fact, the memoir mostly features Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, though there is some discussion (briefer and more elliptical in "The Restored Edition") of their breakup and of Pauline. I'm not about to get into the middle of such internecine conflict. Both editions are essentially the same book, and they are both very good. There might be more material in the latter edition, and I particularly liked the Fragments section appended at the end, where you get a nice feel for how Hemingway worked, like watching multiple takes of the same scene from a movie one after the other. The best way to read A Moveable Feast now just might be to read them both (though note: the earlier one appears to be a little harder to acquire, which is probably only going to get worse).

In case it's not at the library.

A Farewell to Arms (1929)

If a revisit to The Sun Also Rises was disappointing, A Farewell to Arms was worse. The only redeeming part of it, to at least start with the good, was the war scene of retreat and confusion in the last third, when our faithful narrator must finally jump into the river to escape. The love story I thought was hideous—juvenile, empty, unbelievable. If there are or were women like Catherine Barkley in the world, they are harder now for me to take seriously—that whole stoic, long-suffering, plucky figure seems to me mostly a relic of abandoned values and passé. Seems to be, let me say, as we know that all things pass and all things return again and that's how we do it. But in this post-feminist early 21st century a character like that seems to me irrelevant. The first time I read this, circa 1975, I found the ending moving and touching, and I should say that this time I was again affected by it. All sentiment, of course, because this time I also raged against it on another level—I mean, what obvious manipulative claptrap. He leaves the war, tragedy, tragedy, tragedy. Events defy belief. It's too much. In this novel over and over it is the silently suffering stoic, sucking it all up and never making a peep about the pain. People nowadays may talk too much about pain and emotions—but people of that age certainly did not talk enough. Thus A Farewell to Arms seems to me more than anything else just dated. War is hard, but this story is hard in remarkably uninteresting ways. There are numerous conversations here that include apologies for saying too much, requests to stop saying so much, etc. I like to think that this is all a thing of the past, but we'll know better a hundred years from now. Meanwhile, of course, there are the usual Hemingway strengths, such as they are, some I had not noticed before, or forgotten, such as the extreme brevity of the first chapter, which gives it the feel of a curtain-raising invocation, and brings a kind of initial high that I only wish had been merited by what follows.

In case it's not at the library.

The Sun Also Rises (1926)

What I remember best about reading Ernest Hemingway "way back when" was that most of my reading friends disliked him to varying degrees of intensity, and thus he became something of a guilty pleasure for me, whose novels and stories I consumed in great chunks. But since then I have not returned to him much, at least until recently, for various reasons, not least that there was no longer any peer pressure mitigating against liking him. I noticed there were some changes to the blurbs on his books: he now has done "more to change the style of English prose than any other writer in the twentieth century" and is charged with paving the way for Raymond Carver. Thus encouraged, I embarked on his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, which I read first—again, in one great gulp—in 1975 or so, and went through again in the '80s. Even back then I was troubled by the appearance of the word "nigger," and even more, on that score, by the black jazz drummer whose dialogue is reported as "......" Fine—whatever. Allowances need to be made for historical context. Yet it still seemed offensive, because so gratuitous. But fine—leave that alone. I was more than horrified, this time, to find the style of writing dreadfully opaque—straightforward nouns and verbs, yes, but always concerned with superfluities, banal description alternating with banal dialogue. And then the premise. What hokum. I mean, I can handle the heavy-handed symbolism of castration by war. But making the eunuch the narrator? And, worse, the stoic sufferer? Too much. Almost laughable. Then there's the problem of the Lady Brett Ashley, who is thoroughly unlikable. She and the eunuch deserve one another, but it's fairly evident we're intended to find the two of them noble and heroic, or at least indulge their drunkenness as understandable. All right, but I'd preferred they remained passed out for the duration. I understand this novel is considered significant perhaps more for its stylistic, formalistic qualities than as a war novel or any other kind of novel (profligate youth, post-WWI manners, "lost generation," Roaring '20s, whatever). And, right, you can't miss the sizzle and electricity of the language, and I appreciate the connection to Carver. But this is such a simple-minded exercise of unexamined privilege that it mostly trumps all for me now. Enough with the silent heroics. Whine a little, why don't you. You were grievously wounded. For all the acclaimed pellucid qualities of the language it is remarkably ponderous, inflating itself to comical proportions. "......" indeed.

In case it's not at the library.