Book Notes: The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (Scribners 1938)
The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (Scribners 1938)
Inspired by the recent great Ken Burns/Lynn Novick PBS documentary, I looked for and found on my shelf The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (Scribners 1938). I’ve had this volume for a long time but hadn’t previously read any of its 49 short stories.
April 19, 2021
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (Cosmopolitan magazine 1936), is gripping, vivid, suspenseful. Wealthy guy, beautiful wife, great white hunter, safari in Africa, tension, “cowardice”/ confidence and tragedy. Elegant.
2. April 26, 2021
The Capital of the World (Esquire magazine 1936; "The Horns of the Bull"). Madrid; second rate, washed up bullfighters; Paco and his sisters, the waiters and the priests, Enrique the dishwasher, etc.; vivid characters through their back stories; foreboding, idealism, disillusion and tragedy, all in 13 pages.
3. May 3, 2021
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Esquire magazine 1936). While waiting for the inevitable, a vivid reflection on life’s adventures and traumas, missed opportunities, regrets and death.
4. May 10, 2021
Old Man at the Bridge (originally composed as a news dispatch from the Amposta Bridge over the Ebro River in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, as the Fascists were set to overrun the region; first appeared in Ken Magazine, 1938). The impact of war on civilians, resignation, depression, impending death. Casualties of war contrasted with symbols of peace. Morality of an old man who yearns for the safety of the animals he cared for contrasted with the morality of the soldier who leaves him behind.
5. May 17, 2021
Up in Michigan (written in 1921 when Hemmingway was 22 years old; appeared in Hemmingway’s first published work, printed in Paris in 1923; set in Horton Bay, Michigan, close to where Hemingway spent his adolescent summers). Once again, memorable, vivid characters reflective of a man’s world in a bygone era. A Canadian blacksmith and outdoorsman, a naive, impressionable, small town waitress, his deer hunting trip, and whiskey on his return. And then, what was inevitable from the outset. Gertrude Stein is said to have deemed the story unpublishable (“inaccrochable”), and Hemingway's sister described it as “a vulgar, sordid tale”.
6. May 24, 2021
On the Quai at Smyrna (first published in the 1930 Scribner's edition of the In Our Time collection of short stories; Hemingway was in Paris [1922] when he received a cable from the Toronto Star ordering him to Constantinople to cover the war between Greece and Turkey. Smyrna is now the city of Izmir in Turkey). These two pages (which are a fictionalized account of events Hemingway did not witness) drew more commentary than any of the other short stories in the collection that I’ve read thus far. Ironically, at this time, a story of nations fighting over land, the horrendous plight of refugees, the terror and inhumanity borne by the innocent, and the responsibility and perhaps callousness of the British.
7. May 31, 2021
Indian Camp (first published in 1924 in the Transatlantic Review in Paris.. Hemingway's semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams—a child in this story—makes his first appearance). Childbirth; death. Innocence. Initiation. Cruelty? Brutal.
8. June 7, 2021
The Doctor And The Doctor’s Wife (written in 1924; published first in the Transatlantic Review and then in In Our Time (1925), by Boni & Liveright; the second to feature Nick Adams, Hemingway’s autobiographical alter ego. In his youth, Hemingway and family spent summers on Walloon Lake, near Petoskey, Michigan. Hemingway's father, who was a doctor, taught him to hunt, fish, and camp in the woods and lakes of Northern Michigan)
9. June 14, 2021
The End of Something (published in the 1925 edition of In Our Time, by Boni & Liveright. Closely autobiographical.) More Horton Bay and more Nick Adams. The end of an era, the abandoned lumbering town that is Horton Bay, and the end of a relationship between young Nick and teenaged Marjorie. The feeding fish that don’t strike, the line that can be let out or reeled in. The keen knowledge and ability of a young woman. Nick, disingenuous and threatened by the young woman’s independence and strength, plus the late appearance of Nick’s friend Bill. Metaphors abound and harbingers of things to come.
10. June 21 , 2021
The Three Day Blow (published in the 1925 edition of In Our Time, by Boni & Liveright. The fourth in the collection to feature Nick Adams, Hemingway's autobiographical alter ego.) Nick and Bill in the northern Michigan woods, picking up from where they left off in The End of Something, talking about literature, baseball, their fathers, the perils of marriage and Marjorie, and drinking to get drunk, The wind storm, which ends, and Nick’s anxiety about the end of his relationship with Marge. Nick (“Wemedge”; Hemingway's nickname in World War I) realizes he could resume the relationship (breakup the result of classism and her mother), can hold her “in reserve”. Heavy on dialogue, imagery, allusions and literary references, similes and metaphors, symbols and repetition.
11. June 28, 2021
The Battler (published in the 1925 New York edition of In Our Time, by Boni & Liveright; the fifth in the collection to feature Nick Adams, Hemingway’s autobiographical alter ego; the principals—Ad and Bugs—are based on real-life prototypes). Violence - by a railway brakeman and, in a temporary camp down an embankment, by a pair of drifters, “Ad”, an addled former boxer, and “Bugs”, the boxer’s Black companion. Racial attitudes, sensitivities and discrimination - the way in which Bugs is addressed and in which Bugs addresses Ad and Nick. Ambiguities - the marriage of Bugs to his “sister”; the relationship between Ad and Bugs; also, as Bugs varies between acting as a servant, as a companion and exercising control. Nick is again a catalyst and not the central figure, and is again a witness to (and here also the victim of) violence.
12. July 5, 2021
A Very Short Story (published as a vignette in the 1924 Paris edition titled In Our Time; rewritten and added to Hemingway's first American short story collection In Our Time, published by Boni & Liveright in 1925; based on Hemingway’s World War I affair with a nurse he met in Milan while recuperating in the hospital from leg injuries sustained at the Italian front; A precursor of A Farewell to Arms.) No dialogue. Love affair during the war; disappointment; futility; isolation of the “Lost Generation”; abrupt end, to the affair and the story.
13. July 12, 2021
Soldier’s Home (1925 Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers; published by Boni & Liveright in Hemingway's 1925 New York collection short stories, In Our Time)
WWI PTSD/ after shock in Oklahoma. Symbolism, Expressionism, Realism. Isolation, unease with complicated relationships, inability or lack of desire to love, distant parents, etc. With a basis in Hemingway’s WWI experience and his familial relationships.
Biographer Carlos Baker writes that in his short stories Hemingway tried to learn how to "get the most from the least, [to] prune language, [to] multiply intensities, [to] tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth". Hemingway adapted this style into a technique he called his iceberg theory: as Baker describes it, the hard facts float above water while the supporting structure, including the symbolism, operates out of sight.
14. July 19, 2021
The Revolutionist Revolutionary fervor in 1919 Italy. Idealism. Naivete. Hemingways’s “omission theory” (“iceberg approach”), his use of symbolism and autobiographical allusions.
Based on the 1919 Hungarian ”White Terror”. Published as a vignette in the 1924 Paris edition of In Our Time; rewritten as a short story for the 1925 American edition by Boni & Liveright. Probably written in 1923 or 1924, when Hemingway lived in Paris with his first wife Hadley Richardson. A year earlier all of his manuscripts were lost when Hadley packed them in a suitcase that was stolen. Acting on Ezra Pound's advice that he had lost no more than the time it took to write the pieces, Hemingway either recreated them or wrote new vignettes and stories.
15. July 26, 2021
Mr. and Mrs. Elliot
Satirization (“malicious gossip”) of a failed marriage of Chard Powers Smith, a man known to and disliked by Hemingway. Originally titled “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”. The protagonist, as referred to in one analysis, “Naive and willfully inexperienced (and therefore gullible), undersexed and over-privileged, prudish and priggish, perhaps latently homosexual.” Smith maintained a bitter grudge about the story all his life. Written in a mocking style. Boston, Paris, Dijon, Touraine. Actual title, I’ve read, is referential to T.S. Eliot, also disliked by Hemingway.
Published in 1924 in Ford Madox Ford's literary magazine Transatlantic Review in Paris and republished by Boni & Liveright in Hemingway's first American volume of short stories In Our Time in 1925.
16. August 2, 2021
Cat in the Rain
A tribute, of sorts to Hemingway’s first wife Hadley (hi Hadley); egalitarian; androgyny; marital tensions; relationship tensions; symbolism.
And hi Catherine Lane - "The ideal woman in his fiction is both a career woman and feminine, capable of true love--Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms. In his androgynous experiments with his last wife Mary, Hemingway called himself Catherine—or Cat. “She loves me to be her girls, which I love to be,” he said. Androgeny is a subject dramatized in his last unfinished novel The Garden of Eden— which got censored by Feminists. The main woman character, Catherine, is depicted as a liberated modern woman who has degenerated from the heroic wartime nurse Catherine of A Farewell to Arms into a narcissistic hedonist who wants to do nothing but have fun.
Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon (non-fiction about Spanish bullfighting history and traditions), "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water."
Cat in the Rain was first published by Richard Hadley of Yaakarawatta Boni & Liveright in 1925 in the short story collection In Our Time, which derives its title from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer ("Give us peace in our time, O Lord").
17. August 9, 2021
Out of Season
A young American couple going fishing with a local guide in Italy; the Italian guide is drunk and needy, his Italian and German are hard to understand, the wife is critical of her husband, is reluctant and cold on the cloudy rainy day, the couple is concerned that fishing is illegal as the season has not yet begun, they do not have the gear they need, and the outing is canceled on the banks of the river, which is discolored by melting snow (turbid). Everything is “out of season”. Ironically “Out of Season” was included in Hemingway’s “In Our Time” collection of stories. The collection is considered to be his first major inquiry into the state of the post World War I “lost generation” .
It has dawned on me that the “lost generation” that Hemingway writes about may, unfortunately, be a guide to understanding much of the post-COVID environment.
“a world of thorough disorientation. Spiritual deadness, anomie, aimless wandering, conflict between genders and cultures, and miscommunication
“the communal loss of temporal, geographical, and cultural certainties”
“the disruption of time and mythic experience as at once a pressing reality and a pertinent metaphor for the entire angst- and anomie- ridden post-World War I landscape.”
18. August 16, 2021
Cross Country Snow
Masculine living, skiing in Switzerland, responsibilities of fatherhood, close boyhood friendships, Nick Adams growing up, and the resulting natural resistance and tension. Semi-autobiographical again. Themes of sex, conflict, companionship, change, love, loss, and adventure; literary metaphors, poetic prose, repetition with variation, and crisp subtle details. All in 3 ½ pages.
FIrst published in 1924 in Ford Madox Ford's literary magazine Transatlantic Review in Paris and republished by Boni & Liveright in Hemingway's first American volume of short stories In Our Time in 1925.
“a terrifyingly denatured and devitalized landscape of alienation, lostness, and emptiness.”
First published in 1923 in Paris in the privately printed book, Three Stories and Ten Poems; included in his next collection of stories, In Our Time, published in New York in 1925 by Boni & Liveright.
19. August 23, 2021
My Old Man
Italy and France after the war. Narrated by a 12 year old boy whose mother had died and who travels with his father, an aging and reputedly crooked steeplechase jockey from Kentucky. The son and the father deeply love and care for each other. Hemingway wrote what he knew and this one reflects his passion for horse racing. Considered the weakest of the stories in the In Our Time collection, but still Hemingway. Vivid characters and places; and investment in the story.
Written in 1922 (Hemingway was 23, married and living in Paris where he was foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star from until Hadley became pregnant in 1923 when they returned to Toronto); published in 1923 in Three Stories and Ten Poems, also included in In Our Time, published in New York in 1925 by Boni & Liveright. Because it was in the post to editors, this was one of two stories to survive the "great suitcase debacle" of the previous year, when a suitcase containing all of Hemingway's manuscripts was stolen from Hadley at a Paris train station,
20. August 30, 2021
Big Two-Hearted River: Part I
Heavily autobiographical. Nick Adams returns home after being wounded in the war, seeking solace in nature in the form of hiking, camping, fly fishing and rising trout, grasshoppers and pine trees. Highly descriptive, heavy on symbolism, devoid of plot.
Hemingway’s descriptions of landscape were influenced by Expressionist painting: “I’m trying to do the country like Cézanne.” The influence is evident in the simplicity of the large general images repeated without detailing—“burnt hillside,” “pine plain,” “range of hills,” “far blue hills.” These basic forms are archetypal, particulars that express universality. Cézanne mutes colors, Hemingway minimizes colors— both exemplifying Expressionism in contrast to Impressionism. Both artists deploy contrasts between light and dark and major forms such as hills and plains. Both delineate objects, Cézanne with outlines and Hemingway with successions of short sentences. Both are economical, increasing the significance of selected details. (Michael Hollister)
Acclaimed as among the best American short stories, perhaps Hemingway’s best. One of my favorites so far, undoubtedly influenced by passages like this.
“Now as he looked down the river, the insects must be settling on the surface, for the trout were feeding steadily all down the stream. As far down the long stretch as he could see, the trout were rising, making circles all down the surface of the water, as though it were starting to rain.”
Published in the 1925 Boni & Liveright edition of In Our Time, the first American volume of Hemingway's short stories. Full Text
21. September 6, 2021
Big Two-Hearted River: Part II
Profound appreciation of nature, of solitude and tranquility. Respect for the animals and insects found in nature. Hemingway‘s mother, Grace Hemingway, believed in the early 20th-century "back to nature" movement, and his father was a physician who taught science to his son. Semi-autobiographical, as post war, injured Nick attempts to clear his mind in the northern Michigan wilds, but is not yet prepared to face the unknown of the swamp. Great tales of camping, and especially of fishing.
As he put on pressure the line tightened into sudden hardness and beyond the logs a huge trout went high out of water. As he jumped, Nick lowered the tip of the rod. But he felt, as he dropped the tip to ease the strain, the moment when the strain was too great; the hardness too tight. Of course, the leader had broken. There was no mistaking the feeling when all spring left the line and it became dry and hard. Then it went slack.
His mouth dry, his heart down, Nick reeled in. He had never seen so big a trout. There was a heaviness, a power not to be held, and then the bulk of him, as he jumped. He looked as broad as a salmon.
Nick's hand was shaky. He reeled in slowly. The thrill had been too much. He felt, vaguely, a little sick, as though it would be better to sit down.
The leader had broken where the hook was tied to it. Nick took it in his hand. He thought of the trout somewhere on the bottom, holding himself steady over the gravel, far down below the light, under the logs, with the hook in his jaw. Nick knew the trout's teeth would cut through the snell of the hook. The hook would imbed itself in his jaw. He'd bet the trout was angry. Anything that size would be angry. That was a trout. He had been solidly hooked. Solid as a rock. He felt like a rock, too, before he started off. By God, he was a big one. By God, he was the biggest one I ever heard of. Full Text
