New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Read online

  Any questions? The leopard? He is part of the metaphysics. I did not hire out to explain that nor a lot of other things. I know, but I am under no obligation to tell you. Put it down to omertá. Look that word up. I dislike explainers, apologists, stoolies, pimps. No writer should be any one of those for his own work. This is just a little background, Jack, that won’t do either of us any harm. You see the point, don’t you? If not it is too bad.

  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explain for, apologize for or pimp or tout for some other writer. I have done it and the best luck I had was doing it for Faulkner. When they didn’t know him in Europe, I told them all how he was the best we had and so forth and I over-humbled with him plenty and built him up about as high as he could go because he never had a break then and he was good then. So now whenever he has a few shots, he’ll tell students what’s wrong with me or tell Japanese or anybody they send him to, to build up our local product. I get tired of this but I figure what the hell he’s had a few shots and maybe he even believes it. So you asked me just now what I think about him, as everybody does and I always stall, so I say you know how good he is. Right. You ought to. What is wrong is he cons himself sometimes pretty bad. That may just be the sauce. But for quite a while when he hits the sauce toward the end of a book, it shows bad. He gets tired and he goes on and on, and that sauce writing is really hard on who has to read it. I mean if they care about writing. I thought maybe it would help if I read it using the sauce myself, but it wasn’t any help. Maybe it would have helped if I was fourteen. But I was only fourteen one year and then I would have been too busy. So that’s what I think about Faulkner. You ask that I sum it up from the standpoint of a professional. Very good writer. Cons himself now. Too much sauce. But he wrote a really fine story called “The Bear” and I would be glad to put it in this book for your pleasure and delight, if I had written it. But you can’t write them all, Jack.

  It would be simpler and more fun to talk about other writers and what is good and what is wrong with them, as I saw when you asked me about Faulkner. He’s easy to handle because he talks so much for a supposed silent man. Never talk, Jack, if you are a writer, unless you have the guy write it down and have you go over it. Otherwise, they get it wrong. That’s what you think until they play a tape back at you. Then you know how silly it sounds. you’re a writer aren’t you? Okay, shut up and write. What was that question?

  Did I really write three stories in one day in Madrid, the way it said in that interview in The Paris Review and Horizon? Yes sir. I was hotter than a—let’s skip it, gentlemen. I was laden with uninhibited energy. Or should we say this energy was canalized into my work. Such states are compounded by the brisk air of the Guadarramas (Jack, was it cold) the highly seasoned bacalao vizcaíno (dried cod fish, Jack) a certain vague loneliness (I was in love and the girl was in Bologna and I couldn’t sleep anyway, so why not write.) So I wrote.

  “The stories you mention I wrote in one day in Madrid on May 16 when it snowed out the San Isidro bullfights. First I wrote The Killers’ which I’d tried to write before and failed. Then after lunch I got in bed to keep warm and wrote ‘Today is Friday.’ I had so much juice I thought maybe I was going crazy and I had about six other stories to write. So I got dressed and walked to Fornos, the old bull fighter’s cafe, and drank coffee and then came back and wrote ‘Ten Indians.’ This made me very sad and I drank some brandy and went to sleep. I’d forgotten to eat and one of the waiters brought me up some bacalao and a small steak and fried potatoes and a bottle of Valdepeñas.

  “The woman who ran the Pension was always worried that I did not eat enough and she had sent the waiter. I remember sitting up in bed and eating, and drink the Valdepeñas. The waiter said he would bring up another bottle. He said the Señora wanted to know if I was going to write all night. I said no, I thought I would lay off for a while. Why don’t you try to write just one more, the waiter asked. I’m only supposed to write one, I said. Nonsense, he said. You could write six. I’ll try tomorrow, I said. Try it tonight, he said. What do you think the old woman sent the food up for?

  “I’m tired, I told him. Nonsense, he said (the word was not nonsense). You tired after three miserable little stories. Translate me one.

  “Leave me alone, I said. How am I going to write it if you don’t leave me alone. So I sat up in bed and drank the Valdepeñas and thought what a hell of a writer I was if the first story was as good as I’d hoped.”

  I have used the same words in answering that the excellent Plimpton elicited from me in order to avoid error or repetition. If there are no more questions, should we continue?

  It is very bad for writers to be hit on the head too much. Sometimes you lose months when you should have and perhaps would have worked well but sometimes a long time after the memory of the sensory distortions of these woundings will produce a story which, while not justifying the temporary cerebral damage, will palliate it. “A Way You’ll Never Be” was written at Key West, Florida, some fifteen years after the damage it depicts, both to a man, a village and a countryside, had occurred. No questions? I understand. I understand completely. However, do not be alarmed. We are not going to call for a moment of silence. Nor for the man in the white suit. Nor for the net. Now gentlemen, and I notice a sprinkling of ladies who have drifted in attracted I hope by the sprinkling of applause. Thank you. Just what stories do you yourselves care for? I must not impose on you exclusively those that find favor with their author. Do you too care for any of them?

  You like “The Killers”? So good of you. And why? Because it had Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner in it? Excellent. Now we are getting somewhere. It is always a pleasure to remember Miss Gardner as she was then. No, I never met Mr. Lancaster. I can’t tell you what he is really like but everyone says he is terrific. The background of that story is that I had a lawyer who had cancer and he wanted cash rather than any long term stuff. You can see his point I hope. So when he was offered a share in the picture for me and less cash, he took the more cash. It turned out badly for us both. He died eventually and I retained only an academic interest in the picture. But the company lets me run it off free when I want to see Miss Gardner and hear the shooting. It is a good picture and the only good picture ever made of a story of mine. One of the reasons for that is that John Huston wrote the script. Yes I know him. Is everything true about him that they say? No. But the best things are. Isn’t that interesting.

  You mean background about the story not the picture? That’s not very sporting, young lady. Didn’t you see the class was enjoying itself finally? Besides it has a sordid background. I hesitate to bring it in, on account of there is no statute of limitations on what it deals with. Gene Tunney, who is a man of wide culture, once asked me, “Ernest, wasn’t that Andre Anderson in ‘The Killers’?” I told it was and that the town was Summit, Illinois, not Summit, N.J. We left it at that. I thought about that story a long long time before I invented it, and I had to be as far away as Madrid before I invented it properly. That story probably had more left out of it than anything I ever wrote. More even than when I left the war out of “Big Two-Hearted River.” I left out all Chicago, which is hard to do in 2951 words.

  Another time I was leaving out good was in “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.” There I really had luck. I left out everything. That is about as far as you can go, so I stood on that one and haven’t drawn to that since.

  I trust you follow me, gentlemen. As I said at the start, there is nothing to writing short stories once you get the knack of it.

  A story I can beat, and I promise you I will, is “The Undefeated.” But I leave it in to show you the difference between when you leave it all in and when you take it out. The stories where you leave it all in do not re-read like the ones where you leave it out. They understand easier, but when you have read them once or twice you can’t re-read them. I could give you examples in everybody who writes, but writers have enough enemies without doing it to each other. All really good writers know exactly wh
at is wrong in all other good writers. There are no perfect writers unless they write just a very little bit and then stand on it. But writers have no business fingering another writer to outsiders while he is alive. After a writer is dead and doesn’t have to work any more, anything goes. A son of a bitch alive is a son of a bitch dead. I am not talking about rows between writers. They are okay and can be comic. If someone puts a thumb in your eye, you don’t protest. You thumb him back. He fouls you, you foul him back. That teaches people to keep it clean. What I mean is, you shouldn’t give it to another writer, I mean really give it to him. I know you shouldn’t do it because I did it once to Sherwood Anderson. I did it because I was righteous, which is the worst thing you can be, and I thought he was going to pot the way he was writing and that I could kid him out of it by showing him how awful it was. So I wrote The Torrents of Spring. It was cruel to do, and it didn’t do any good, and he just wrote worse and worse. What the hell business of mine was it if he wanted to write badly? None. But then I was righteous and more loyal to writing than to my friend. I would have shot anybody then, not kill them, just shoot them a little, if I thought it would straighten them up and make them write right. Now I know that there is nothing you can do about any writer ever. The seeds of their destruction are in them from the start, and the thing to do about writers is get along with them if you see them, and try not to see them. All except a very few, and all of them except a couple are dead. Like I said, once they’re dead anything goes as long as it’s true.

  I’m sorry I threw at Anderson. It was cruel and I was a son of a bitch to do it. The only thing I can say is that I was as cruel to myself then. But that is no excuse. He was a friend of mine, but that was no excuse for doing it to him. Any questions? Ask me that some other time.

  This brings us to another story, “My Old Man.” The background of this was all the time we spent at the races at San Siro when I used to be in hospital in Milan in 1918, and the time put in at the tracks in Paris when we really worked at it. Handicapping I mean. Some people say that this story is derived from a story about harness racing by Sherwood Anderson called “I’m a Fool.” I do not believe this. My theory is that it is derived from a jockey I knew very well and a number of horses I knew, one of which I was in love with. I invented the boy in my story and I think the boy in Sherwood’s story was himself. If you read both stories you can form your own opinion. Whatever it is, it is all right with me. The best things Sherwood wrote are in two books, Winesburg, Ohio and The Triumph of the Egg. You should read them both. Before you know too much about things, they are better. The best thing about Sherwood was he was the kind of guy at the start his name made you think of Sherwood Forest, while in Bob Sherwood the name only made you think of a playwright.

  Any other stories you find in this book are in because I liked them. If you like them too I will be pleased. Thank you very much. It has been nice to be with you.

  June 1959

  La Consula

  Churriana

  Malaga, Spain

  * * *

  * This introduction is reprinted from the Paris Review 79 (1981), where "The Art of the Short Story" was first published.

  I

  Critical Approaches

  Narrative Voice

  The Unifying Consciousness of a Divided Conscience: Nick Adams as Author of In Our Time

  Debra A. Moddelmog

  In the lengthy passage that was Hemingway’s original ending to “Big Two-Hearted River,” Nick Adams, having caught “one good trout” (NAS, 213), rests and reflects on many things, particularly his writing.1 For readers of In Our Time, who have arrived with “Big Two-Hearted River” at the book’s final story, this interior monologue (had Hemingway kept it) would have revealed some interesting facts, but none more so than that Nick has written two of the stories we have just read: “Indian Camp” and “My Old Man.” Indeed, in the final scene of this ending, Nick heads back to camp “holding something in his head” (NAS, 220) and is apparently preparing to write “Big Two-Hearted River” itself. But lest we misunderstand these stories, Nick also explains his method of composition: “Nick in the stories was never himself. He made him up. Of course he’d never seen an Indian woman having a baby. That was what made it good. Nobody knew that. he’d seen a woman have a baby on the road to Karagatch and tried to help her. That was the way it was” (NAS, 217–18).

  Most critics who discuss this rejected conclusion generally assume that Hemingway lost control of his art here, identified too closely with Nick, and began writing autobiography rather than fiction.2 In fact, both Hemingway’s critics and biographers quote from this monologue as if Hemingway, not Nick, were the speaker.3 Even when a critic, like Robert Gibb, takes Hemingway at his word, he concludes that we need not worry finally about distinguishing between Nick and Hemingway. Whether a story has been written by “Hemingway the writer who wrote in the character of Nick Adams” or by “Nick Adams the writer who, by existing, shaped the idea of a man and his cosmos” matters not, according to Gibb: “Remembrance goes both ways.”4

  Remembrance may go both ways, but Gibb is finally wrong to suggest that our understanding of a story remains the same regardless of whom we see as its author. Obviously, all words lead back to Hemingway, and I would not wish to suggest that in stories of In Our Time he is introducing the kinds of author-character confusions we have come to expect from many postmodern writers. However, as I hope to show, there are some good reasons for seeing Nick as the implied author of In Our Time, and doing so resolves many confusions about the book’s unity, structure, vision, and significance. Moreover, such an approach casts new light on Nick Adams as a character separate from yet also an extension of Hemingway.

  In his book-length study of Nick, Joseph Flora states, “No one would argue that ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ would gain from the inclusion of Nick’s several memories and theories of writing.”5 I want to make clear from the start that I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. From the moment Nick arrives at Seney he does everything in his power to hold back his thoughts, yet in the nine pages that Hemingway finally rejected, Nick suddenly begins thinking and does so calmly and contentedly. This ending would have reduced the story’s tension and given us a very different Nick Adams. That Hemingway realized this indicates how clear a vision he had formed of what he wanted to accomplish in his fiction. His letter to Robert McAlmon—written in mid-November 1924, about three months after he finished “Big Two-Hearted River” and two months after he had arranged and submitted In Our Time for publication—provides the fullest explanation of his reasoning: “I have decided that all that mental conversation in the long fishing story is the shit and have cut it all out. The last nine pages. The story was interrupted you know just when I was going good and I could never get back into it and finish it. I got a hell of a shock when I realized how bad it was and that shocked me back into the river again and I’ve finished it off the way it ought to have been all along. Just the straight fishing.”6 In brief, Hemingway recognized that “all that mental conversation” jarred asthetically with the rest of his story and actually contradicted its point.7 Wisely, he cut.

  But just because Hemingway saved “Big Two-Hearted River” by removing Nick’s monologue does not mean that we, like a jury commanded to disregard a witness’s last remark, should automatically ignore all we learn here. Certainly critics are right that Hemingway comes close to crossing the boundary between fiction and experience in these pages, but that is a line he almost always approaches in his Nick Adams stories. As Flora notes, “Although Nick is not Hemingway, he reflects more of Hemingway than any other Hemingway hero,”8 and Philip Young observes that Nick has “much in common” with his creator and was, for Hemingway, “a special kind of mask.”9 Significantly, Hemingway’s letter to McAlmon disloses that he revised his conclusion because he was worried about the artistic integrity of his story, not about his artistic persona.

  Ironically, it is actually because Hemingway was so close to Nick and yet no
t Nick that he was able to conceive of surrendering authorship to Nick without destroying the illusion of his fictional world. Of course, when he wrote “Big Two-Hearted River,” Hemingway had already written almost every story in In Our Time (only “The Battler” and “On the Quai at Smyrna” came later), and so obviously he did not plan from the time he composed these stories to attribute any of them to Nick. However, Nick shared so much of Hemingway’s personality and experience that turning him into the author of the stories ex post facto required very little work. All Hemingway had to do was supply Nick with the relevant background, specifically a writing career and some postwar history. This he was doing in the nine pages he eventually cut out. And, as I indicated above, Hemingway actually gave Nick the background needed to be considered author of all of In Our Time, not just of the two stories he specifically mentions, “My Old Man” and “Indian Camp.”

  The evidence leading to this deduction begins with a sentence quoted earlier in which Nick tells us: “Nick in the stories was never himself.” The use of the plural “stories” is significant. Because Nick is not in “My Old Man,” he apparently has written other stories about himself besides “Indian Camp.” This hypothesis is supported by Nick’s references in this lengthy monologue to people and places that play a part in other Nick Adams stories. For example, Nick thinks about fishing at Hortons Creek (NAS, 216), the scene of the breakup with Marjorie in “The End of Something,” and he remembers “drinking with Bill’s old man” (NAS, 215) which calls to mind “The Three-Day Blow.” He also mentions his wife, Helen, a figure whose existence we learn of in “Cross-Country Snow.” Finally, Nick states that his family has misunderstood his stories, believing that they were all recountings of his experience (NAS, 217). One implication of this statement is that his relatives have been reading fiction in which Nick appears as a central character and have presumed that the other characters are themselves; the most likely candidate to provoke this reaction would be “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife.”