New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  But Nick’s memories of people and places are not limited to those which materialize in stories about himself. Many of his allusions also recall non-Nick narratives of In Our Time. For instance, the woman giving birth on the road to Karagatch, the encounter from which Nick indicates that “Indian Camp” derives, is presented without change in chapter 2. Nick also states that too much talking had made the war unreal (NAS, 217), an attitude shared by Harold Krebs in “Soldier’s Home.” The matador Maera figures prominently in Nick’s thoughts (e.g., “Maera was the greatest man he’d ever known,” NAS, 216), as he does in chapters 13 and 14 of In Our Time. Nick even confesses that “His whole inner life had been bullfights all one year” (NAS, 216), an obsession that could explain why six of the fifteen chapters deal with that subject. All of these connections between Nick’s memories reviewed during his fishing trip to upper Michigan and the narratives of In Our Time support the premise that this original conclusion supplied the personal history necessary to see Nick as the author of this book.

  To repeat what I said earlier, we need not assume that Nick lost all of this past when we lost this ending. In fact, a key sentence in the version of “Big Two-Hearted River” that was finally published implies that this background did not disappear forever but simply moved, so to speak, underground. Soon after Nick starts hiking away from Seney and toward the river, he discovers that “He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs” (IOT, 134).10 Exactly why Nick feels so relieved to leave behind these three needs becomes clear when we see In Our Time as the product of his experiences and imagination. Although obviously we cannot pin down the precise date when Nick wrote any particular story in In Our Time—excluding perhaps “Big Two-Hearted River”—we can, I think, safely infer that he composed most of the book after World War I. Not only do most of the stories describe events of this war or shortly thereafter (the Greco-Turkish War, American couples visiting Europe, soldiers returning to the States), but also Nick admits that “He always worked best when Helen was unwell” (NAS, 218), a condition that definitely arises after the war. By roughly dating the composition of these stories, we are able to connect them to that stage in Nick’s life immediately following World War I, and they can, therefore, help us to understand the Nick Adams we meet in “Big Two-Hearted River.”

  In approaching the stories of In Our Time as if Nick were their author, we discover that it will, indeed, be easier to trace through them Nick’s recent psychological history than his actual history. Because Nick has told us that he was never himself in his stories and because we lack the biographical evidence (letters, memoirs, interviews) that usually fill the gap between an author’s life and his fiction, we are left wondering where we might find the real Nick Adams. The fact that Nick’s family has taken his fiction for autobiography suggests that, like Hemingway, Nick was drawing heavily from life when he wrote his stories.11 Still, we will have to guess, for the most part, at what Nick actually experienced, at “the way it was” (NAS, 218). But since our main interest is Nick’s psyche, we need not worry too much about our inability to sort reality from imagination. By looking for repeated patterns and by studying the subjects that Nick chooses to develop as well as his manner of presenting those subjects, we should uncover those fixations of his imagination that reveal his basic outlook on life.

  Having established the parameters of our investigation, we find new fascination in one fact about Nick’s history that we do know: “he’d never seen an Indian woman having a baby. . . . he’d seen a woman have a baby on the road to Karagatch and tried to help her.” This confession about the source of “Indian Camp” indicates, first of all, that the woman Nick attempted to help has affected him deeply. As I have already noted, Nick reports this encounter directly in chapter 2 of In Our Time, a description which ends with the comment “Scared sick looking at it” (21). Apparently neither version alone was enough to purge Nick of this memory, and the question is why he is so preoccupied with it.

  Part of the answer could lie in the transformations Nick makes when turning the experience into fiction. Not only does he concentrate on the pain and suffering of childbirth, but he also changes the witness of the delivery from an adult immersed in war and evacuation to a child involved with family life and night-time adventures. Such a transference is psychologically symbolic. It implies, first, that the older Nick views his meeting with the woman on the road to Karagatch as an initiation of the innocent. By projecting himself as a young boy present at a difficult childbirth, Nick suggests that he feels victimized by the exigencies of the adult world (“It was an awful mess to put you through,” his father says—IOT, 18) and also reveals a lingering inability to accept suffering and dying (“[C]an’t you give her something to make her stop screaming?” “Do ladies always have such a hard time having babies?” “Do many men kill themselves?” “Is dying hard?”—IOT, 16, 19). A strong degree of self-pity thus permeates the story, especially its final scene where the young Nick questions the all-knowing father. However, Nick also attacks that self-indulgence with self-irony by ending his story with the child’s denial of his own mortality, a denial that he, a war veteran and writer, now knows to be a lie.

  But “Indian Camp” discloses more about Nick than just the fact that he feels victimized and confused by life. It also reveals his despair, possibly even his guilt, over being unable to ease the suffering of the woman on the road to Karagatch. In describing the source of his story, Nick tells us that he “tried” to help this woman, a qualifier which implies failure. He reproduces that sense of helplessness and frustration in the person of the Indian father who commits suicide because he “couldn’t stand things” (IOT, 19). But he also places the suffering Indian mother in the professional hands of Dr. Adams, who does stop her pain and delivers her child. Nick thereby completes in his imagination what he failed to do in reality. Fiction serves as wish fulfillment by enabling Nick to control a world that seems to deny all attempts at such control.

  Feelings of horror and frustration, and a desire not to enter the complex realm of adulthood help to explain why Nick has built two separate narratives out of his meeting with the woman in Asia Minor. But, in fact, this focus on pain and suffering—both experienced and observed, physical and mental—countered by a wish to escape or deny that vision actually forms a pattern found throughout the stories of In Our Time, especially those in which Nick is a central character. In “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” we are witnesses to the marriage of incompetence and insularity and find that its sole issue is incompatibility. The young Nick responds to the friction of his parents’ relationship and the myopia of his mother by ignoring the latter’s summons for that of black squirrels. In “The End of Something” and “The Three-Day Blow,” Nick discovers for himself the agony of relationships and reacts to that pain, first, by retreating from all companionship, even that of his friend Bill, and then by retreating from the home, the conventional domain of woman, to the woods where “the Marge business was no longer so tragic. It was not even very important. The wind blew everything like that away” (IOT, 49). Nick learns in “The Battler” about the cruelty of society and the viciousness of insanity, a lesson which ends, once again, in confused escape. And, finally, in chapter 6, the violence of war so shatters Nick’s spine and peace of mind that he vows to make “a separate peace,” to desert not only the battlefield but also the patriotism that led him to that destructive arena.

  A quick glance at the six non-Nick stories which follow chapter 6—our last look at Nick until he reappears in “Cross-Country Snow”—is enough to confirm the paradigm. In fact, although the flight from pain is not depicted as regularly in these stories, the vision they present is so similar to that found in the Nick narratives that we can have no doubt that their author is the same. In “A Very Short Story” a soldier who wants to marry his girlfriend-nurse “to make it so they could not lose it” (IOT, 65) does lose “it.” The woman jilts him, and he subsequently loses
his health when he contracts gonorrhea from a salesgirl in the backseat of a cab. Harold Krebs, the soldier come home, loses touch with the reality of World War I and his own identity: by lying he “lost everything” (IOT, 70). The revolutionist, failing to comprehend the political reality of the world, is captured by the Swiss and loses his freedom; the narrator of his story has already lost his own political idealism. And the couples in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” “Cat in the Rain,” and “Out of Season” all dramatize loss of understanding, communication, and love; in place of these things they substitute reading, a cat, writing reams of poetry, a lesbian affair, fishing.

  This consistency of vision found throughout the stories we have examined so far suggests that Nick has a fairly inflexible, troubled way of seeing the world. No matter what or whom he writes about, he tends to view life as a losing proposition. Gertrude Stein’s “You are all a lost generation” describes In Our Time as aptly as it describes The Sun Also Rises in this sense: Nick seems to believe that the things most worth having and caring about—life, love, ideals, companions, peace, freedom—will be lost sooner or later, and he is not sure how to cope with this assurance, except through irony, bitterness, and, sometimes, wishful thinking. Although we cannot determine definitely when such a belief was formed, the most likely candidate to have precipitated this change is, of course, Nick’s involvement in two wars—WWI and the Greco-Turkish war of 1922—which brought him face to face with many kinds of losses, especially of life and ideals. As I have already discussed, Nick was so shaken by his encounter with the pregnant woman on the road to Karagatch, an encounter that certainly included violent pain and possibly death, that he created two stories out of it. The several other narratives of In Our Time depicting the violence and senselessness of war (“On the Quai at Smyrna” and chapters 3, 4, 5, and 7) emphasize Nick’s obsession with these matters.

  And as if we needed further evidence, the bullfighting chapters (9–14) reinforce the extent and nature of Nick’s fixation. Nick, we recall, has declared that “His whole inner life had been bullfights all one year,” and thus he implies that these narratives represent his inner experience as much as his actual experience. In general, these six chapters repeat themes and images found in the earlier war chapters: men and animals being maimed and killed, cowardice, fear, rare stoicism in the face of death, even rarer triumphs over the enemy, be it man or beast. However, the most interesting chapter in terms of Nick’s mental state is the last one in which Nick “kills off” his friend, the matador Maera, a man who, as Nick’s monologue makes clear, is still living. By projecting Maera’s death, Nick seems to be preparing himself for the inevitable, the loss of another comrade like Rinaldi whose situation in chapter 6 closely resembles Maera’s: both men lie face down, silent, still, unable to defend themselves, waiting for stretchers to carry them off the field.

  In “Big Two-Hearted River” we find another hint at how much Nick is bothered by losing friends when he thinks about Hopkins, a memory associated with bitterness and one he is glad exhaustion prevents him from contemplating further. Hopkins seems to have disappeared suddenly from Nick’s circle of comrades—either because of death or wealth—for “They never saw Hopkins again,” despite plans for a fishing trip the next summer (IOT, 141). As Nick says in the excised conclusion to “Big Two-Hearted River”—in a statement that refers to artists but seems to have more general applications—“They died and that was the hell of it. They worked all their lives and then got old and died” (NAS, 219). In sum, part of what brought Nick to the Big Two-Hearted River is the same thing that brought him to writing: a need to come to terms with all the loss he has experienced in the last few years and, equally important, the loss he has come to expect.

  That Nick takes his trip to upper Michigan to restore both his mind and his spirit debilitated by war has, of course, been the accepted reading of “Big Two-Hearted River” ever since critics began to assess the story formally.12 Hence, my analysis so far has primarily enabled me to clarify the state of Nick’s mind, the memories which are troubling him. However, an important question regarding Nick’s trip which has never been satisfactorily settled is why he waits so long after the war to take it. Many readers of In Our Time have assumed that its Nick stories are arranged chronologically so that the Nick who appears in “Cross-Country Snow,” the husband and soon-to-be father, is slightly younger than the Nick who appears in “Big Two-Hearted River.” But if this chronology is correct, then we somehow have to explain why Nick, who seems healthy in “Cross-Country Snow,” could suddenly become so unstable that he must take off to the Michigan woods to escape “the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs.”

  In 1972, Philip Young resolved Nick’s apparent about-face by reversing the order of these two stories in The Nick Adams Stories. “Big Two-Hearted River” takes place, he asserted, immediately after World War I; “Cross-Country Snow” follows, displaying the success of Nick’s recuperative journey to the river.13 Yet Hemingway’s original conclusion to “Big Two-Hearted River” disputes this rearrangement, for in it Nick mentions Helen and discusses the reactions his friends have had to his marriage. Obviously, when Hemingway wrote this story he saw Nick as a married man, someone who had been back from the war for some time. But even without this external evidence, we should still, I think, date “Big Two-Hearted River” several years after the war. Support for this proposal lies in the stories that Nick has written, especially in those that come after chapter 6 describing Nick’s wounding.

  The non-Nick stories that follow this chapter might seem, simply by virtue of their point of view, to be based less on Nick’s actual experience and more on his imagination than those narratives in which his namesake plays a central role. However, without biographical evidence we cannot prove this. Given some of the parallels between Nick’s ideas stated in the excised “Big Two-Hearted River” monologue and those presented in the non-Nick stories, it appears that Nick is still drawing heavily from his life. To repeat an earlier example, Nick claims that the war was made unreal by too much talking, an assertion that sounds very similar to Harold Krebs’s discovery that “to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it” (IOT, 69).

  Why Nick should choose to present some of his experiences through the medium of his alter ego and other experiences through varying viewpoints could have to do, therefore, with his sensitivity to certain subjects. In other words, Nick might romanticize a protagonist named after himself yet be willing to describe his most painful, embarrassing, and passionate experiences when safely shielded—from both his readers and himself—behind a more opaque persona. Young maintains that this is the approach Hemingway took in his writing: “he tended to smuggle certain things away in his fiction; if they were compromising or shameful and he wanted to get rid of them he chose masks much less transparent than Nick’s.”14 In a classic psychoanalytic paradox, the closer the matter is to Nick the writer, the further away Nick the character is likely to be. The non-Nick stories can thus hold the key to Nick’s innermost secrets and fears.

  The area of chronology provides the first clue that the non-Nick stories reflect those anxieties that trouble Nick most deeply. As we have seen, the first half of In Our Time traces the growth of Nick’s alter ego from a young boy to a young man, almost qualifying it as a bildungsroman. However, throughout the rest of the stories, except for “My Old Man,” the age of the male protagonist remains steady, from late teens to mid twenties, or approximately Nick’s age at the time he wrote these narratives. And while an age correspondence between the male characters in the non-Nick stories and Nick himself does not definitely prove that the former are fictional alter egos, it does seem more than just a coincidence that Nick has written so many stories about men who are basically his age or a bit younger.

  Moreover, these men share more with Nick than simply his age. Excluding the narrator of “The Revolutionist” (whose story may or may
not be founded in Nick’s history), all of these men are pictured in situations which we know—from the discarded conclusion to “Big Two-Hearted River”—that Nick himself has recently experienced, specifically, returning from the war and getting married. Once again, we cannot be sure how directly Nick has drawn from his own life in creating these stories, and so the more general patterns and attitudes are what most concern us.

  In the two stories about recovering soldiers, “A Very Short Story” and “Soldier’s Home,” the protagonists attempt to engage in normal civilian life, yet find this participation difficult. The anonymous soldier’s plans for such a life are foiled when Luz jilts him; Harold Krebs is simply repulsed by the hypocrisy of postwar America and its middle-class life-style. However, both men react, rather than act, and consequently lose the chance to control their own destinies. The soldier rebounds from Luz into the arms of a nameless salesgirl who gives him not love but gonorrhea. Krebs surrenders to his family’s demands to lie and to get a job and thereby contributes to the hypocrisy he detests. These stories thus show us men who are greatly confused about their futures after returning from the war.