New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  When the news from Spain in the second week of March revealed the extent of the Rebel breakthrough in the Republican lines, in a matter of days Hemingway decided that he could no longer stay home writing stories. “I feel like a bloody shit to be here in Key West when I should be in Aragon or in Madrid,” he wrote Perkins on March 15. Two days later, as soon as he could clean up his affairs at home, he left Key West, and the day after that he sailed from New York on the Ile de France with a briefcase full of the stories he was planning to include in the new collection. He arrived in Paris on March 24, made a quick trip to the Spanish border to see if he could get into the Rebel side, and somehow found time to go over the stories while waiting for Martha Gellhorn to join him.3 On March 30 he took the night train to Perpignan with Vincent Sheean and young Jim Lardner, where they picked up a car for the trip into Spain.4 They arrived in Barcelona in the evening of March 31, and the next day Hemingway set off with Herbert Matthews to visit the Aragon front.5

  Throughout the last two weeks of March the military situation of the Republican forces had been growing steadily worse as the Rebels pressed their drive to the Mediterranean. By April 1 the Rebels had virtually achieved their objective and, perhaps even more threatening, large numbers of the Republican forces, including elements of the International Brigades, were in retreat toward Catalunya. Hemingway’s first task was to make his way to Gandesa, where many of the remaining forces of the International Brigades were said to be concentrated, but when he and Matthews tried to reach the Brigades, they were brought to a halt on the road outside Falset by a continuous stream of fleeing peasants with their carts and animals and by retreating soldiers who told them that Gandesa had just fallen to the Rebels. The rear guard, they said, was trying to hold the bridge at Mora de Ebro nearby. Unable to get any closer, the next day Hemingway and Matthews turned back to Barcelona, where Hemingway filed his first dispatch describing the flight of these refugees and soldiers.6

  The next four weeks would become the most intensive stretch of reporting Hemingway was to do during the entire war. The first dispatch of April 3 was followed by two others on April 4 and 5, and there was another burst of four dispatches in little over a week in the middle of the month as the Rebel forces finally broke through to the Mediterranean at Vinaroz on April 15. The Republican zone was cut in two, and the conquest of Catalunya now seemed imminent. The Rebels began bombing Tortosa, the first major town on the coastal road to Barcelona, while Hemingway reconnoitered the banks of the Ebro River as they prepared their assault. By the end of April he had sent off nine dispatches, more than twice the number he had filed in any previous month of the war, and he wrote three more in the first ten days of May, one of which he chose not to send.7

  It had been a month of exhausting work. Most correspondents covering the battles along the Aragon front were based in Barcelona. To get their dispatches out the same day required some six hours of hard driving to the front lines just beyond the Ebro and another six hours back again, a drive often slowed by the flood of refugees from the war zone or interrupted by the bombing and strafing of Rebel aircraft. Hemingway also knew from the difficulties he had encountered on his first two trips to the war that delays at the censorship office or in the telephone lines out of Spain would probably confront him once he was back in Barcelona and that to make his deadlines he would have to write his pieces quickly and without time for reflection or polishing. There was a stretch, beginning on April 13, when he was making the trip from Barcelona down to the Ebro and back almost every day and filing reports every other day.

  It was also dangerous work. Italian and German aircraft operated at will behind the lines, bombing and strafing the roads leading into and out of Tortosa without fear of encountering Republican aircraft or effective antiaircraft fire. Correspondents driving up and down these roads could never know when their own cars would become targets or when they would get trapped in a line of stalled tanks and trucks. Nor could they know where or when the Rebels might break through the Republican defenses, possibly cutting off their return to Barcelona. And when they got closer to watch the movement of the opposing infantry, there was always the danger of a sniper’s bullet or a random artillery shell finding its victim.

  On Easter Sunday, April 17, in the midst of this intensive period of reporting and just as he was about to cross the Ebro and enter its Delta in search of the advancing Rebel forces, Hemingway saw an old man sitting beside the pontoon bridge at Amposta. When he returned to the bridge an hour or two later, the old man was still there. Although Hemingway had not been able to locate the enemy forces, he knew they were not far away, and he had seen enough fighting and had run enough risks himself in the last two weeks to know that the old man could not stay there long. He apparently stopped to talk with the old man and to take in the scene of the fleeing refugees crossing the pontoon bridge, for he made a set of notes recording his impressions of the scene and some of the details of his conversation with the old man.8

  1

  Grey sky—deserted road where formerly streams of trucks—glum faces on Tarragona road—The colour of retreat is grey.

  Rain—Battalion of prisoners with picks and shovels [“guarded by” scratched out] marched in column of fours—guarded by carabineros—yellow belts—

  herds of sheep and goats—Peasants retreating with umbrellas—camp under the olive trees breaking up—carts taking to the road again.

  2

  Old man with steel spectacles—sitting by the dusty road—scattered with corn from a coop of chickens tied to back of a cart—dog on a chain under the cart—bucket dangling behind—/3 [inserted] women [changed from “woman”] /one [inserted] with 2 folded blankets on her head—another holding 3 live chickens—a boy with a basket—third woman riding a mule packed

  3

  Old man had left San Carlos—he stayed behind [with “4” scratched out] to take care of [“4” scratched out] 2 goats /3 cats [inserted]—4 pair of pigeons—But the captain said the artillery were coming—he was 68 [scratched out]—72—Had to leave them finally [“They wi” changed to] The cats will be all right—But who will feed the pigeons—had walked 12 kilometers—since day light—

  These notes from the Amposta bridge are much like the notes he had been taking all along. To help him meet deadlines, Hemingway had developed the practice, common to journalists then, of jotting down his observations on pieces of paper folded into quarters. These observation notes provided most of the material for the dispatches he would file later that night or the next day.9

  Whatever the differences in details, the field notes for the story and the dispatches he filed during the months of April and May are made up of quick impressions grouped around a set of images or a single, direct experience. The practiced observer is at work, searching the landscape for a visual image or a key notion that will help focus the imagination and give the writer the control he needs over his material. Telegraphic reminders of things mostly seen, seldom heard, the notes were only meant to jog the memory into releasing enough details for that night’s or the next day’s article. “Pink of almond blossoms,” “camped by road like gypsies,” “soldiers . . . holding their rifles by the muzzles,” the notes for his April 3 dispatch on the flight of refugees from the Ebro valley recorded. The notes seldom contained reflections on what was happening, although occasionally some of them caught a moment’s reflection on the beauty of what he saw. “The bright blue of the Mediterranean turned milky by the yellow flood of the Ebro” began the notes of April 5,10 and there were other lyrical moments in other notes scattered among the staccato impressions.11

  Because the notes he made at the Amposta bridge are similar in form to the notes for his news dispatches of this period, it looks as though Hemingway originally intended the notes for “Old Man at the Bridge” to end up as another dispatch. Even the circumstances of the story’s composition and the form by which it was sent out of Spain make it look like another dispatch. We know, because of the Barcelona censor’s stamp
on Hemingway’s copy of the cable, that the story went out at 11:10 on the night of April 17, the same day he encountered the old man at the Amposta bridge. He must have written it in a great rush, for he was twelve hours that day on the road and probably had no more than four or five hours after he got back to Barcelona in which to write.12 It was only 800 words long, and Hemingway sent it out, not by mail, as he did his other stories, but by cable, the way he did his news dispatches. In almost every respect, therefore, the story of the old man at the Amposta bridge looks like another dispatch.13

  But something happened that day to change his mind about the material he had gathered, for instead of sending the cable to NANA, he sent it to Ken magazine. The immediate reason was a deadline. Before he returned to Spain, Hemingway had contracted with Arnold Gingrich, the editor of Ken as well as the editor of Esquire, to write a biweekly article for this new antifascist and anticommunist magazine. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which was financial, Hemingway had been scrupulous about meeting his first deadlines. His last article for Ken had been sent from Paris at the end of March, and now, in mid-April, he knew another one was due.14

  What he had seen that day could be turned into something other than a news story. He must have realized, moreover, that a news story about an old man, a refugee, would have differed little in the eyes of the NANA editors from the report on refugees he had already filed at the beginning of the month. He had earlier discovered, much to his annoyance, that NANA would balk at releasing material of his that seemed to them repetitious or un-newsworthy. He would use the material for a short story, he decided, and beat the Ken deadline.

  We know from his own testimony that writing a story, although it usually took days or weeks rather than hours, could sometimes go quickly. “I can’t write a story like a piece,” he told Arnold Gingrich later that year. “The story takes charge of itself very quickly.”15 Apparently it had been the figure of the old man sitting beside the bridge worrying about his animals that had taken charge of Hemingway’s imagination by the time he got back to Barcelona. His confidence in his ability to get the story down quickly, his knowledge that Gingrich was waiting for another piece and would accept virtually anything he wrote, his need for the money Ken magazine would pay him, and most of all his intuitive sense that the old man sitting beside the Amposta bridge represented much of what he had seen of the war these last two weeks led him to write a story instead of another news dispatch.16

  After setting the scene with a brief description of the fleeing refugees and explaining that the narrator had come to that place in order to locate the advancing enemy, Hemingway builds the rest of his story around “an old man with steel rimmed spectacles and very dusty clothes” seated by the side of the road. The narrator stops to ask the old man where he is from and finds out that he had been taking care of animals in a nearby town. He does not look like a shepherd, so the narrator questions him further. It turns out the animals are a cat, some pigeons, and two goats. The old man is now worried about what will happen to them.

  All the while this conversation is taking place the narrator is scanning the horizon and listening for the first signs of contact with the approaching enemy. He realizes the old man cannot stay there and urges him to move on up the road where he can catch a ride on a truck, but the old man is tired, and when he finds out the trucks are headed for Barcelona, he realizes he cannot accept the offer. “‘I know no one in that direction.’ he said, ‘but thank you very much. Thank you again very much.’” His world, we suddenly understand, scarcely extends beyond his village of San Carlos.

  The narrator, a man who seems to know his way in the world, is momentarily stymied. They talk again about the animals, and the narrator tries to reassure the old man.

  “Why they’ll probably come through it all right.” “You think so?”

  “Why not,” I said, watching the far bank where now there were no carts.

  The old man, wanting to be agreeable with the helpful stranger, reassures himself that the cat can take care of itself, and the narrator, encouraged by this touch of hope, helps the old man to see that because he has left the dove cage unlocked, the pigeons will fly away when the artillery starts firing. “‘Yes, certainly they’ll fly. But the others. It’s better not to think about the others,’ he said,” knowing that the animals are the only family he has and are all that he can think about. The narrator tries once more to get the old man moving.

  “If you are rested I would go,” I urged. “Get up and try to walk now.”

  “Thank you,” he said and got to his feet, swayed from side to side and then sat down backwards in the dust.

  The story ends abruptly as the narrator moves off, leaving the old man to his unspoken fate.

  Hemingway must have known that, however brief it was, he had written a powerful story. He soon found out that others thought so too. The next day Gingrich cabled him: “Marvellous piece. Feel that these short punches have done more good for Loyalist cause than volumes ordinary reporting, judging by terrific response received.”17 Gingrich’s praise was not forgotten when Hemingway returned to the United States, for shortly after he got back he wrote Max Perkins that he wanted to include “Old Man at the Bridge” in the new collection of his short stories. “I enclose that story I cabled to Ken the day we evacuated Amposta. It would make a story for the book I think—An Old Man at a Bridge. What do you think?”18 Perkins agreed, and the title of the book was promptly changed from the First Forty-eight to the First Forty-nine Stories.

  When The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories was published later that fall, Edmund Wilson reviewed it in The Nation along with “The Spanish War,” a collection of Hemingway’s civil war dispatches reprinted by Fact.19 Although Wilson generally praised the stories, especially the four most recent ones (including “Old Man at the Bridge”), he was critical of the play and thought the dispatches, where Hemingway was “always diverting attention to his own narrow escapes from danger,” were inept.

  The review provoked an angry reply from Hemingway, too angry in fact to send.20 Before his anger took over, however, Hemingway explained to Wilson that the news dispatches had been reprinted “behind my back and without my knowledge.” “I am not ashamed of the dispatches,” he went on. “All are true. But I do not go in for reprinting journalism.” “Old Man at the Bridge” was another matter, he told Wilson.

  The odd thing, and what I thought might interest you, was that the story of the old man at the pontoon bridge at Amposta was written and sent out by cable the same night we lost the Amposta bridge-head. The difference was that it was for a magazine so I could write a story about the old man and not a news dispatch.

  Transforming Facts into Fiction

  The fact that Hemingway ended up with a short story instead of a news dispatch may have been an accident of timing and circumstance, but it proves to be an unusually revealing accident, for it provides a unique insight into the nature of his talent for writing short stories. Thanks to his field notes and drafts, we can watch from beginning to end the process of creation and see in detail how he transformed his experiences and observations into a work of art. In seeing how differently, moreover, he used his field notes to write his dispatches on the one hand and this short story on the other, we can begin to appreciate why Hemingway insisted, with Wilson and with everyone else, that his fiction was not to be confused with his journalism.

  In writing his NANA dispatch of April 3 on the flight of the refugees, Hemingway depended heavily on his field notes for almost all of his observations.21 Sometimes a dozen words in the notes are expanded into several paragraphs. “Planes—the ditch—the olive trees—Reus—the bombing—clouds of dust—brown dust”—these fragments become a three paragraph account of how Hemingway and his driver had to dive into a ditch when an airplane flew low over their car on its way to bombing the town of Reus up ahead, one of those scrapes with danger that Wilson found so inept. At other times he hardly expands on the notes at all. “Old w
omen—crying driving the carts—8 children behind one cart—2 goats tied-behind—one sheep—cooking pots—mattresses—sewing machines—bags of grain for the mules—4 goats—mattresses wrapped in matting”—all end up as the substance of a single paragraph.

  That was how the day started but no one yet alive can say how it will end. For soon we began passing carts loaded with refugees. An old woman was driving one, crying and sobbing while she swung a whip. She was the only woman I saw crying all day. There were eight children following another cart and one little boy pushed on the wheel as they came up a difficult grade. Bedding, sewing machines, blankets, cooking utensils, mattresses wrapped in mats, and sacks of grain for the horses and mules were piled in the carts and goats and sheep were tethered to the tailboards. There was no panic. They were just plodding along.

  Altogether Hemingway made use of almost two-thirds of the images he had put down in his notes while traveling up and down the Falset road, and if he did not include an observation in the dispatch, it was usually because something quite like it had already been noted. In effect virtually every fresh observation in the notes ended up in his dispatch.

  There is one episode in the dispatch, however, that hardly received a mention in the notes but becomes, or looks as though Hemingway wanted it to become, a story in its own right. “Babies born on road,” he jotted down in the notes. In the dispatch he describes a woman riding on a mule piled high with bedding and holding her newborn baby. For a moment it seems as though this scene of the mother and her baby would break out of the constraints of the article and become a story on its own. There is even some dialogue between the husband and the correspondent, but the correspondent is riding in a car, and they are going in opposite directions—the correspondent heading into the war to gather more material for his article, the father fleeing from it with his family and possessions. And so the article cuts the story off and picks up another scene from the panorama of fleeing refugees. Toward the end of the dispatch Hemingway returns to the baby and its mother, now covered with dust after two days on the road, and uses them as an image of the weariness the refugees were now suffering. Despite the narrative power of this vignette, neither it nor any of the other vignettes he recorded are allowed to develop on their own terms.