New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  The dispatch restricts itself to the visual details of a vast, colorful scene. There is no sustained focus of attention, no time, really, to understand what is going on. As a result, we have no way of knowing what these refugees, or even Hemingway for that matter, are thinking and feeling, and thus we have no way of sharing the meaning of their experiences. We can only imagine what is happening to them from the condition they are in, and even this is not always a reliable guide. “Many of the people seemed cheerful,” Hemingway noted at one point. In the end there are so many of them and the correspondent is so committed to describing as accurately as he can the whole of the changing panorama around him that this dispatch, although a perfectly straightforward, well-observed account of the tragic and sometimes dramatic sights of war, fails nonetheless to achieve the clarity and intensity of a good story.

  If the inquiry into the emotions of people is constrained by the need to be comprehensive and inclusive—to provide, that is, good coverage—and as a result the fleeing refugees and soldiers become objects whose lives we cannot fully comprehend rather than subjects with whom we can engage our imaginations, part of the reason is the persona that the writer of news stories must assume. That persona is the dispassionate observer. Although Hemingway was expected to write “color stuff” and sometimes included himself in the dispatch because, as he explained to Wilson, “if you are paid to get shot at and write about it you are supposed to mention the shooting,” in the bulk of his reporting he is not involved.22 This dispatch, like most of his others of this period, is a dispassionate accounting with little of the self-consciousness that intruded upon his Greco-Turkish war reports of the 1920s.23 The effect of the dispatch on the reader depends on the cumulative weight of its details and not on the involvement of the observer with the subject.

  The story of the old man at the bridge, on the other hand, seeks to achieve a different emotional response. Whereas the dispatch does not give itself time to enlarge the meaning of any single event, the story builds almost wholly upon a single encounter. Through the conversation between the old man and the narrator, Hemingway carefully exposes the sense of loss and confusion that is about to overwhelm the old man and, by extension, the other refugees being driven from their homes by the war.

  In transforming his notes from the Amposta bridge into a story, Hemingway made much more selective use of his notes than he did in writing the dispatch.24 In fact, except for a brief description of the grey, overcast sky that appeared at the head of the notes and that Hemingway used to good effect at the end of the story, everything else in the notes that did not pertain to the old man at the bridge was suppressed. The rain, the herds of sheep and goats, the battalion of prisoners with picks and shovels, the dog on a chain under a cart, and the woman with two folded blankets on her head, these and other images of the fleeing refugees near the Amposta bridge, images that had been the staple of the dispatch from the Falset road, were now discarded.

  The story does begin with visual details much like those that described the flight of the refugees, but none of these details comes from the field notes. They serve, moreover, a different purpose from what they did in the dispatch. Although Hemingway sets the scene for his story by describing how the soldiers and refugees with their carts were struggling to get across the pontoon bridge and up the steep bank on the other side of the river, his main purpose in describing these frantic efforts is not, as it would have been in the dispatch, to present another dramatic event, but to contrast this activity with the immobility of the old man. “But the old man,” he wrote at the end of the first paragraph, “sat there without moving. He was too tired to go any farther.”

  After explaining that the narrator of the story is there because he is trying “to find out to what point the enemy had advanced,” Hemingway from this point on focuses the story on the old man and on the narrator’s changing relationship with him. In doing so, Hemingway uses every image and idea he had jotted down about the old man in his notes, altering some of them slightly in order to clarify and dramatize the old man’s predicament.25 There were three cats in his notes, for instance, but only one in the story. The old man was seventy-two in the notes, but seventy-six in the story. He was worried about the pigeons in the notes; it is the goats he cannot bear to think about in the story. Otherwise the story hardly elaborates at all on the descriptive facts of the old man, Including the fact that he had walked twelve kilometers that day from San Carlos de 1a Rápita in the lower Ebro Delta to get to the closest river crossing at Amposta.26 In this literal sense we can say that this is a “true” report. Like so much of his fiction, no matter how much of it is made up, the story remains faithful to the observed realities on which it is based.

  If the notes reflect the central drama of the old man, it is because Hemingway the observer, Hemingway the correspondent who had been driving back and forth on these roads for more than two weeks witnessing the plight of these refugees, now saw in the old man and his story the whole of their uprooting. Some other refugee’s story would have served him just as well, but it was the old man’s concern for his animals that caught Hemingway’s attention. What dignifies the old man and makes him more than just another casualty of war is his selflessness, his worries about his animals, his reluctance to leave them behind, and his uncomplaining acceptance of his own fate. These give him dignity and purpose. He is no longer simply a victim of war; he is a courageous and defeated human being struggling to survive and to keep alive his last hopes.

  And yet the awful inappropriateness of his worries, so small and ineffective when measured against the destructive forces that are about to overtake him, lend pathos to his single-mindedness. The pathos and dignity of the old man make the story what it is, and the detail Hemingway devoted to this old man in his field notes suggests that he must have recognized it right away.

  By contrast, it was Hemingway’s own broader sense of the danger confronting them both that provides the underlying structure of the story, for the narrator knows, in a way the old man does not yet seem to comprehend, that unless the old man moves on he will probably be killed or captured. The tension in this finely wrought miniature comes from their talking about something else—what will happen to the old man’s animals.

  His sensitivity to the plight of the old man is heightened by his awareness of his own dilemma, for in the end he had to leave the old man to his fate by the side of the road. Hemingway must have been acutely aware of the difference between himself, the correspondent who could come and go as he pleased and in the end could leave it all behind, and the old man whose age and whose love for his animals and his native town bound him to the earth he had just walked over. The difference between them is beautifully and sensitively portrayed in the gentleness with which the narrator questions the old man and encourages him to move on. They are together for only a moment, for that is all this war would allow them, but it is enough for us to see and understand the underlying compassion that brought them together and the terrible forces that will now drive them apart.

  Hemingway’s ability to achieve these powerful effects in such a brief compass depended, of course, on more than his own particular sensitivity. It also required an ability to write convincing dialogue. It required a sense of structure so that the story is pulled taut at the beginning and held tight until the end. It required an eye for credible detail and an experienced sense of the surrounding realities. These are the skills of a seasoned writer, skills acquired over a lifetime of disciplined craftsmanship. In Spain, under the pressure of repeated deadlines and conflicting obligations, Hemingway managed to use these skills with stunning economy and precision. In a few hours, certainly in no more than four or five, he had made the old man at the Amposta bridge into an enduring witness to the Spanish Civil War, to the tragedy, in fact, that engulfs all human beings caught up in the disasters of war.

  The ending, however, remains perplexing. Just as we are caught up in the old man’s struggle, the story comes to a sudden end. The narrator fin
ally persuades the old man that he must move on. The old man gets up only to fall back again into the dust at the side of the road. There is a terrible moment of stillness in the story as the narrator has to decide what he will do—stay and help the old man and run the risk of getting caught or killed himself or leave the old man to fend for himself.27 After paragraphs of intimate dialogue the story suddenly shifts to an objective, impersonal perspective. The lack of sentiment at the end and the coldness with which the narrator makes his decision cloak the emotions and the confusion we can imagine he must have felt.

  There was nothing to do about him. It was Easter Sunday and the Fascists were advancing toward the Ebro. It was a gray overcast day with a low ceiling so their planes were not up. That and the fact that cats know how to look after themselves was all the good luck that old man would ever have.

  The Boundary between Fiction and Fact

  Nothing else Hemingway wrote on the Spanish Civil War captured as flawlessly and accurately the depths of the tragedy that was then engulfing Spain. It is also, in its way, a perfect short story. It has a fully developed character, a powerful drama whose resolution we fearfully anticipate, and a point of view that seems wholly natural and realistic. It is tight and coherent and nothing seems lacking, and yet much of its power comes from a veiled danger we can feel but never quite see. It may not stand, to be sure, in the same rank as Hemingway’s greatest short stories—“Indian Camp,” “Big Two-Hearted River,” and some others—but in the small scale on which it is etched it is a minor masterpiece, a finely shaped portrait of a moment central to the experience of the Spanish Civil War, indeed of all wars in which ordinary people are innocent victims.

  Hemingway was correct to insist that his imaginative writing should not be confused with his journalism. Even though “Old Man at the Bridge” and the dispatch on the refugees fleeing the war along the Ebro River deal with the same subject and are composed from the same kind of raw note materials, they are recognizably different in tone and style and emotional impact. However modest its scale, “Old Man at the Bridge” clearly transcends the direct record of these same experiences contained in his dispatch.

  What, then, makes the difference? Why was this “short punch,” as Arnold Gingrich called it, so much more compelling, more instructive, and in the end more memorable than “volumes of ordinary reporting?” Why do the story and the dispatch evoke such different responses from the reader?

  The details in the dispatch add up and by their cumulative weight make sense as a whole, but they do not grow together to create a single, dominant feeling the way the details in the story do. In the story we become imaginatively involved in the old man’s plight and in the narrator’s dilemma in a way we never have time for in the passing tide of refugees described in the dispatch. We may remember fragmented episodes from the stream of refugees whose lives we observed but never fully understood, but who will forget this old man at the bridge, worried about his animals and too old and tired to walk away from the path of war?

  The transformation of an event, an idea, or some experience in life into a work of art is a complex and largely mysterious process. We seldom have a chance to witness it in any detail, and even more rarely do we have a chance to observe a work of art gain form and meaning from beginning to end. The rough field notes Hemingway jotted down in Spain are but a small hoarding of his creative life, but in bringing them back with him to Key West he has given us a unique opportunity to see how his talent transformed his encounter with an old man at the Amposta bridge into a fine short story.

  Although we can never know precisely how the imagination of Hemingway transformed the observed details of this event into a transcendent work of art, we can begin to see in the transforming power of his imagination why it was that he guarded so carefully his reputation as a craftsman of fiction and why, when a good critic like Edmund Wilson seemed to blur the sacred boundaries between his stories and his newspaper writing, he was outraged.

  Some writers, such as Orwell or Koestler or Naipul, move with equal power and grace from one form of writing to another and give equal weight to their powers of observation in whatever form they may write. Hemingway too could master a subject and give an authoritative account of it, as many of his best newspaper and magazine articles and his books on bullfighting and big game hunting demonstrate. But for all their excellence they do not represent his fullest creative powers nor do they draw upon the deepest sources of his imagination. “Old Man at the Bridge,” modest as it is in scale, does draw upon those sources and fully displays those powers in a way that none of his factual reporting ever could.

  The boundary Hemingway drew between his fiction and his reporting was not, therefore, an arbitrary line, but a way of defining who he chose to be as a writer. In distinguishing his fiction from his reporting, Hemingway was insisting on something essential to his artistic imagination and to the art of his short stories. Throughout his career he zealously guarded this sense of himself as a writer of fiction, and as “Old Man at the Bridge” demonstrates, even in the midst of a war that demanded virtually all of his attention and energy he was still first and foremost a writer of fiction.

  Perhaps for this reason the story seems to have had a special meaning for him, for it was the only story from the Spanish Civil War period that he chose to include in the definitive collection of his short stories. Even in later years, when he could have revised the collection and added stories he had written later, “Old Man at the Bridge” remained the last to be included.

  II

  Story Technique and Themes

  Hemingway’s Apprentice Fiction: 1919–1921

  Paul Smith

  In the three years between Ernest Hemingway’s triumphant return from Italy in January 1919 and his departure for Paris in December 1921, he lived in Chicago for less than a year—a year-and-a-half if you count his intermittent residence in Oak Park, but Oak Park was never meant to count as Chicago. The better half of those years was spent in and around Petoskey and Toronto, for there he wrote the best of both his unpublished and published work, like the “Cross Roads” sketches and his Toronto Star Weekly articles. In Chicago, however, he labored at grub-street stuff for the Cooperative Commonwealth, most of it now in oblivion, and in his time off he wrote poetry, much of it in a style he later called “erectile.”1

  When he remembered the fall of 1919, he recalled shoveling gravel for the county to pay his rent in Petoskey and writing

  stories which I sent to the Saturday Evening Post. The Saturday Evening Post did not buy them nor did any other magazine and I doubt if worse stories were ever written. . . . I was always known in Petoskey as Ernie Hemingway who wrote for the Saturday Evening Post due to the courtesy of my landlady’s son, who described my occupation to the reporter for the Petoskey paper. . . . After Christmas when I was still writing for the Saturday Evening Post and had $20 left of my savings, I was promised a job at the pump factory . . . and was looking forward to laying off writing for the magazines for a time, (item 820)2

  The manuscripts of these stories, for which the pump factory offered some relief, are among a group of some thirteen he wrote between 1919 and 1921, including a few written in the fall of 1918 or on the way home from Italy.3 His first stake in a gamble at writing, these manuscripts range from submitted stories to one-page unfinished sketches. The first was written on Red Cross stationery in November 1918, and the last is the earliest version of “Up in Michigan” from the fall of 1921. Although this number of manuscripts is irreducible to final categories, out of that welter of exploratory writing three emergent styles may be identified. Here I will give each a place-name and cite the first and last sentences of manuscripts that are typical of each.

  First, the “Chicago” style and an example from “The Mercenaries,” written in late 1919:

  If you are honestly curious about pearl fishing conditions in the Marquesas, the possibility of employment on the projected Trans Gobi Desert Railway, or the potentialities of any of t
he hot tamale republics, go to the Cafe Cambrinus on Wabash Avenue in Chicago.

  “Aw, say, Napoleon!” broke in Graves, embarrassedly, “Let’s change that to ‘Vive la doughnut!’”4

  [The reference to the “doughnut”—earlier in the story, “Peruvian doughnuts”—is apparently a slang phrase for a simple task, “a piece of cake.”]

  Secondly, the “Italian” style and an example from a 1918 sketch, “Nick lay in bed . . .” (item 604):

  Nick lay in bed in the hospital while from outside came the hysterical roar of the crowd milling through the streets.

  ‘I had a rendezvous with Death’—but Death broke the date and now it’s all over. God double-crossed me.”

  And third, the “Michigan” style and an example from one of the sketches from “Cross Roads”—again from late 1919:

  Old Man Hurd has a face that looks indecent.

  So after a while she married him, and she told my mother, “The awful part about it was that he looked then just like he looks now.”5

  Consider first the example of the Chicago style. The narrator is an intermediary; he stands between his audience and the unfamiliar scene and characters he observes, but he has the credentials of a trusted listener. He is an inside witness, the reporter with a tip or a password (in “The Woppian Way”); he has passed the test in the “famous camel-needle’s eye gymkhana of entering” the Café Cambrinus (in “The Mercenaries”). So his diction mingles the periphrastic and the colloquial: circumlocutions to delight his audience and display his worldliness along with the language of the streets that admits him to Chicago’s netherworld.