New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  A less dramatic review of the fall and winter of 1919 argues that Howe, a minor and derivative writer himself, set Hemingway some simple and salutary lessons. And the first was to be brief: like most of Howe’s, Hemingway’s sketches run from a paragraph to little more than a page, while his other Chicago manuscripts are stylistically prolix and the narratives inflate brief anecdotes in the tall-tale tradition.

  Howe’s narrative voice and attitude would have been familiar to Hemingway and appropriate for his subjects—the “Bayites,” as he called them. His experience as one of the summer people from Oak Park among the villagers and farmers of Horton Bay and Petoskey might well have encouraged that narrative stance, both a part of and apart from his subject. Throughout his correspondence with Bill Smith and others there is a two-stranded thread of supercilious affection for these naive natives.

  The voice in these sketches is that of a local storyteller speaking in the idiom of the country and with local loyalties. If the irony of the sketch turns back upon the Bay villagers, the narrator rarely disassociates himself from the town. After Ed Paige went six rounds against Stanley Ketchell, “most everyone has forgotten all about it and quite a few say they’ll never believe Ed really did it”; and when Bob White tells of his experiences in the war, the “people out at the Bay don’t think much of France or of the Marines either, for that matter, now that Bob’s back with the news right direct.”24 As we hear or, as it sometimes seems, overhear these twice-told tales of the General Store, it is assumed that we know these people and neither need nor deserve any other explanation or pointed moral than the one that is there in the story.

  The narrative pattern in these sketches is like the one Hemingway found in Howe’s anthology. They take their titles from a character’s name; the opening sentence includes that name and offers some apparently innocent but teasing fact—“Pauline Snow was the only beautiful girl we ever had out at the Bay"; then a brief dramatic narrative; and a conclusion, often ending with a remark by one of the characters or the laconic narrator—Pauline Snow is seduced, talked about, and then sent to a correction home, and her seducer, “Art [Simons] was away for awhile, and then came back and married one of the Jenkins girls.”

  Two years later in the fall of 1921 Hemingway returned to the structure and style of these sketches, particularly to the one of Pauline Snow, when he hurriedly drafted the first version of “Up in Michigan.” The similarities between the brief sketch and longer story are necessarily few, but they are strong. Pauline has Liz Coates’s innocence; her parents are dead, Liz’s are never mentioned; Art Simons has some of Jim Gilmore’s physical characteristics, especially his hands; the sexual act implied in the sketch is realized in the story; and Pauline’s ostracism was a possible consequence that Liz worries about in a rejected conclusion of the early version of “Up in Michigan.”

  The first typescript (item 800) of the story begins with a canceled introduction similar to those in the “Cross Roads” sketches: “Wesley Dilworth got the dimple in his chin from his mother. Her name had been Liz Buell. Jim Dilworth married her when he came to Horton’s Bay from Canada.” A related typescript (item 801) includes a variant ending in which Liz returns from the dock to worry through the night: “Liz was frightened and sick when she got up to her room. She put on one of her unwell pads because she was afraid of blood getting on the sheets. She felt ashamed and sick and cried and prayed until she fell asleep. She woke up frightened and stiff and aching. . . . ‘What if I have a baby?’ she thought. . . . She thought about having a baby until it was morning.”

  The parenthetical beginning-and-ending was finally rejected months later in Paris. But had Hemingway retained it, the story would have had the frame typical of the “Cross Roads” sketches, beginning with the provocatively innocent reference to Wesley Dilworth’s dimple and ending with Liz’s worrisome question, “What if I have a baby?” The answer to her question would have been there in the story’s first sentence: Wesley Dilworth, dimple and all.25

  Hemingway knew that this or any other version would not have amused the editors of the popular magazines; he was, I think, for the first time writing for himself. An unusual manuscript for that reason, it may be unique for another. If Hemingway’s account in A Moveable Feast of the loss of his manuscripts is true—and some wonder if it is—then this typescript is the only Chicago story for which there is tangible evidence that it was packed for Paris in the late months of 1921.

  That single typescript says, finally, a good deal about the value he placed on the rest of the manuscripts he left boxed in Chicago: simply that they exist, oddly enough, is proof of his early and harsh judgment. And that you can hold this typescript of “Up in Michigan” in your hand somehow makes unsubstantial all the other “lost” manuscripts, the sometime existence of which depends on a love letter, a remark passed on, or a late memory answering the needs of Hemingway, those who knew him then, or the biographers who wish to know him now.

  Throughout the fragmentary remains of Hemingway’s Chicago years—the manuscripts, the letters, and the memoirs—there are some bitter and urgent notes: first he wanted to publish, then he wanted Hadley, and finally he wanted out. His best work was appearing in the Toronto Star Weekly, while in Chicago he was hacking for the Cooperative Commonwealth. However much Hadley liked his poetry, no one this side of Paris would print it; and for every submitted story he had at least one rejection slip.

  To end this review of the manuscripts from Hemingway’s Chicago years one looks for some representative anecdote, and it is there, where it should be, in one of his stories set outside of Chicago, “The Killers.” Its manuscript reflects the cold winter of 1919, for its rejected beginning opens in Petoskey. I will take that story of Nick Adams’s initiation as an analogue of Hemingway’s. At the end, what Nick realizes is that for some people, like his friend George, an inevitable and “awful thing” can be dismissed with a popular explanation: “He must have got mixed up in something in Chicago, . . . [and] that’s what they kill them for.” But Nick Adams, and before him Ernest Hemingway, decided, “I’m going to get out of this town.”26

  The Troubled Fisherman

  Kenneth S. Lynn

  The longest of the fishing trips he took in the summer of 1919 was into the woods in the upper peninsula of Michigan near the town of Seney, about fifteen miles south of Lake Superior. In seven days of casting in the Big Fox and Little Fox rivers, Ernest and two friends, Al Walker and Jock Pentecost, caught about two hundred trout. One of the fish pulled in by Jock was fifteen and a half inches long, but it was Ernest who almost landed what would have been the prize catch. “I lost one on the Little Fox below an old dam,” he wrote to Howie Jenkins, “that was the biggest trout I’ve ever seen. I was up in some old timbers and it was a case of horse out. I got about half of him out of wasser and my hook broke at the shank!”1 He did, however, gather in the materials for a notable piece of fiction.

  In the fish story he had just finished writing, he told Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas on August 15, 1924, he had been “trying to do the country like Cézanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit. It is about 100 pages long and nothing happens and the country is swell. I made it all up, so I see it all and part of it comes out the way it ought to, it is swell about the fish, but isn’t writing a hard job though?”2 His sense that the story was swell about the fish was not mistaken. (“He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge.”)3 Nor was he speaking idly when he suggested that his recreations of landscape were like a series of pictures by Cézanne. (“Ahead of him, as far as he could see, was the pine plain. The burned country stopped off at the left with the range of hills. On ahead islands of dark pine trees rose out of the plain. Far off to the left was the line of the river.”)4 I
n two respects, that is to say, his letter furnished the Misses Stein and Toklas with an accurate sense of what he had accomplished. But interestingly enough, he made no mention of the most difficult of all the objectives he had been seeking to attain in “Big Two-Hearted River”: to endow a story in which “nothing happens” with an inner drama of terrific intensity.

  As the solitary Nick Adams leaves the train station at Seney and walks across a “burned-over country” toward “the far blue hills that marked the Lake Superior height of land,”5 he feels a wonderful sense of release. “He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him.”6 Toward the end of the day he pitches his tent and crawls inside, noting with pleasure how “homelike” the space seems. At last, he thinks, “he was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in the good place. He was in his home where he had made it.”7

  From this point forward the story abounds in details of how splendid the fishing is and of what a good time Nick is having. Nevertheless, dark thoughts of some sort are lurking on the margins of his consciousness. While he is finishing his supper the first night, he suddenly becomes aware that his mind is “starting to work,” but because he is tired he is able to “choke it.”8 The next day his happiness is again interrupted. An arduous battle with the biggest trout he has ever seen ends with the trout’s escape, and as Nick is reeling in his line he feels “a little sick, as though it would be better to sit down.”9 To avoid the possibility of a second defeat in one day, he thereupon modifies his plans. Instead of plunging into the armpit-deep water of a swamp overshadowed by big trees, where he might hook big trout in places impossible to land them, he decides to postpone the adventure. “There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp,” he says to himself, as the story ends.10

  What are the “other needs” Nick feels he has put behind him as he heads off toward the river? Why does he more than once refer to his tent as his home, and why does he feel so pleased to be in it? Why is it that failure to kill the big fish makes him feel sick? With the exception of “The Battler,” “Big Two-Hearted River” raises more tantalizing questions than any other Hemingway story.

  Plausible answers to these questions may be found by placing the story in its biographical context. Ernest spent the summer of 1919 thinking and writing. He also spent it in bitter contention with his mother. The following summer the ill will between the two of them exploded into open warfare when she expelled him from Windemere within days of his twenty-first birthday and presented him as he was leaving with a letter that was indisputably the masterpiece of her epistolary career. Consequently, by the time he wrote the story about his fishing trip to Seney he was not only burdened by upsetting memories of the first summer after the war, but by even more upsetting memories of the second. Perhaps, then, the “other needs” Nick feels he has put behind him include a need to please his mother, while his talk of his tent as his home may represent a reaction to being thrown out of his parents’ summer cottage. Perhaps, too, the burned-over country and the grasshoppers that have turned black from living in it constitute tacit reminders to him of his mother’s penchant for burning things. And finally, the activity of his mind that keeps threatening to overwhelm his contentment could be rage.

  The angler on the bank of the Big Two-Hearted River is clearly a man with a divided heart—but the precise nature of the division is never identified. “In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic.”11 The words apply well to the fisherman’s efforts to shun the murky depths of his troubled inner life. First and last, Nick remains an enigma.

  But to many readers in the twenties, Nick was not an enigma. For these people assumed that the key to Nick’s secret was the fact that his creator was the archetypal representative of a war-scarred “lost generation.” Ultimately, this assumption crept into formal assessments of the story. The experience that has given Nick “a touch of panic,” Edmund Wilson announced in “Ernest Hemingway: Bourdon Gauge of Morale” (1939), is “the wholesale shattering of human beings in which he has taken part.”12 Leading up to and away from this statement, “Bourdon Gauge” contains some wonderfully appreciative comments about the stifled pangs and undruggable disquiet that lurk beneath the most innocent surfaces in Hemingway’s stories. In the case of “Big Two-Hearted River,” however, Wilson felt a need to specify the malaise underlying it, and in doing so he could only think that it had to do with World War I. He cited no textual evidence in support of this diagnosis for the simple reason that there was none. Not a single reference to war appears in the story, and it is highly doubtful, furthermore, judging by what can be observed of Nick’s behavior, that panic is the feeling that he is fending off. Nor does battlefield trauma bear any discernible relation to those vague “other needs” that he feels he has put behind him or to his strong expressions of contentment with his “homelike” tent.

  Half a decade after “Bourdon Gauge,” Wilson’s interpretation was reinforced by Malcolm Cowley’s introduction to the Viking Portable Hemingway (1944). To Hemingway this essay could not have come as a surprise. For in Exile’s Return (1934) Cowley had already proclaimed that the young American writers born in the years around 1900 were a lost generation, inasmuch as the war had shattered their relationship with the country of their boyhood and they had become attached to no other. That Hemingway felt precisely the way he himself did about the war was one of Cowley’s cardinal beliefs, and he delighted in drawing other parallels between their lives. The equivalent for him of Hemingway’s Michigan was Cambria County, Pennsylvania, on the western slope of the Alleghenies, where he had spent his boyhood summers fishing and shooting and walking in the woods, and his equivalent of Oak Park was a residential section of Pittsburgh, where his father practiced medicine, just like Dr. Hemingway. When America entered World War I, Cowley had wanted to join an ambulance corps in France, but because the demand for drivers had slackened by the time he got to Paris, he ended up driving a camion for the French military transport—which in his retrospective view was not all that different from driving a Red Cross truck in Italy. So closely did he identify himself with Hemingway that in his Portable Hemingway introduction he erroneously asserted that the novelist had been born in 1898, the year of his own birth. Hemingway’s awareness of Cowley’s habit of superimposing his own life on his was made explicit by him more than once. Thus, in a letter to Harvey Breit of the New York Times five years before his death, he sardonically observed that “Malcolm thot I was like him because my father was a Dr. and I went to Michigan when I was 2 weeks old where they had Hemlock trees.”13 That Cowley would someday go on from the lost-generation argument of Exile’s Return to a lost-generation interpretation of “Big Two-Hearted River” must have seemed to him like an inevitable development.

  In the Portable Hemingway Cowley argued, not so much by direct statement as by artful implication, that Hemingway’s fisherman, like Hemingway himself, was a war veteran who was trying to block out fear-ridden recollections of being wounded. Proof of Nick’s state of mind was not to be found in the story, to be sure, but that didn’t bother Cowley. Hemingway’s stories “are most of them continued,” he said, by which he meant that the emotions underlying “Big Two-Hearted River” could be understood in the light of the emotions expressed in “Now I Lay Me,” written three years later.14 Since the hero of the latter story is an American lieutenant in war-time Italy who is afraid to close his eyes at night, “Now I Lay Me” has the effect, said Cowley, of giving readers “a somewhat different attitude toward the earlier story” and of drawing attention to something that “we probably missed at first reading; that there are shadows in the background and that part of the story takes place in an inner world.”15

  In stressing an emotional consistency between “Big Two-Hearted River” and “Now I Lay Me,” Cowley
neglected to point out that the most emotional moment in the latter story is set in the hero’s childhood and involves a confrontation between his parents. Nevertheless, Cowley’s endorsement of the war-trauma argument soon became an inspiration to other critics, most notably to an impressionable young man named Philip Young, who “ported a Portable Hemingway halfway across Europe during World War II.”16 In 1952 Young projected the admiration he felt for the Cowley introduction, amplified by his own reactions to war, into a book that proclaimed that the wound suffered by Hemingway in 1918 had so deeply affected him that he had spent his whole life as a writer composing variations on the story of the psychically crippled “sick man” in “Big Two-Hearted River.”17 Ten years later Mark Schorer spoke for what was now a critical cliché when he characterized Hemingway as the lifelong victim of the events that had befallen him at Fossalta di Piave. “Nothing more important than this wounding was ever to happen to him,” Schorer sweepingly declared.18

  Thus, the war-wound interpretation of the story was established not by textual evidence, but by what the critics knew about the author’s life—or rather, by what they thought they knew about his life. And after he was dead, they eagerly seized on his posthumously published comment in A Moveable Feast that “Big Two-Hearted River” was about “coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it” as clinching proof that they were right.19 They would have been better advised to wonder if a master manipulator was not making fools of them from beyond the grave, as he so often had in life.

  For a quarter of a century after the story was published, Hemingway kept his own counsel about it. But in the aftermath of World War II he made a number of statements in which he related it to World War I. In all likelihood, though, these revelations reflected latter-day events. The late forties marked the beginning of the end for Hemingway. Fantasies of suicide thronged his mind, intermingled with fears of insanity, and his friend Buck Lanham saw him writing in the morning with a drink in his hand. For years he had been given to saying that the first war had cost him a lot of sleep, but he had usually been careful to couple such confessions with manly assertions that he had finally put insomnia behind him and was once again in wonderful shape. The breathtaking tragedy that took form in the late forties exposed the hollowness of that boast. All too keenly aware of his problems and yet adamantly opposed to seeking professional help in understanding them, he more than ever felt the need of a heroic explanation for his life. In an effort to account for his imperiled sense of himself, as well as to preserve his macho reputation, he turned once more to Fossalta.