New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

by Jackson J Benson

  14 Hemingway’s previous article for Ken was "The Cardinal Picks a Winner," published in Ken on May 5, 1938. Since Ken had a lead time of about one month, the piece was probably written in Paris just before Hemingway left for Spain on March 30. His contract with Ken called for an article every two weeks, for which he was sent a biweekly check of $200.

  15 EH to Arnold Gingrich, October 22, 1938, in Selected Letters of Ernest Hemingway, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner’s 1982), p. 472.

  16 The story was first published in Ken, 1, 4 (May 19, 1938): 36, and later that year in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories (New York: Scribner’s, 1938), pp. 176–78. It is currently available in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner’s, n.d.), pp. 78–80.

  17 Cable of Arnold Gingrich to EH in Barcelona, April 18, 1938 (cable, JFK).

  18 EH to Perkins, July 12, 1938, in Selected Letters, p. 469.

  19 Edmund Wilson, "Hemingway and the Wars," Nation 147 (December 10, 1938): 628 & 630.

  20 EH to Edmund Wilson, [December 1938] (JFK). The letter is unfinished and undated, but it was probably written soon after the Wilson review, which appeared in the Nation of December 10, 1938. Hemingway complained to Perkins about Wilson’s review in a letter of December 24, repeating in almost identical words the attack he had made in his letter to Wilson as one of those who took no part in the defense of the Spanish Republic but stayed home and discredited those who did. (EH to Perkins, December 24, 1938, PUL:SA. A copy of this letter to Perkins was kindly sent to me by the late Professor Carlos Baker.)

  21 For the complete text of the field notes see "A Variorum Edition of Dispatch 19," Hemingway Review (Spring 1988): 93.

  22 EH to Wilson, [December 1938]. See above, note 21.

  23 Although Hemingway’s reports on the flight of Christian refugees from the advancing Turks in Thrace are similar to his account of the Spanish refugees, in the Spanish refugee piece he has a better sense of control over his material, has learned how to use details to represent larger themes, and has learned to restrain his own presence in the account even though he was more personally involved in the drama of the Spanish refugees than he was in the sufferings of the refugees in Thrace. See Ernest Hemingway, Dateline: Toronto, ed. William White (New York: Scribner’s, 1985), pp. 232 & 249–52.

  24 See the field notes for the story on p. 93.

  25 Michael S. Reynolds, "The Hemingway Sources for in our time," Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, ed. Michael S. Reynolds (Boston: Hall, 1983), pp. 31—37. Reynolds shows how Hemingway changed the details of news accounts to achieve greater fictional clarity and dramatic effect.

  26 San Carlos de 1a Rápita is a small town in the Ebro Delta about twelve kilometers, as Hemingway said it was, south of Amposta. It was about to be overtaken by the Rebels the day the old man fled it.

  27 Anne Tyler, "Introduction," The Best American Short Stories, 1983 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), pp. xiv—xv, notes the importance of a point of stillness in a good short story.

  Paul Smith, “Hemingway’s Apprentice Fiction: 1919–1921”

  1 Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner’s, 1932), p. 53.

  2 I gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to cite items 445, 550, 604, 670, 800, 801, 820, and 843, unpublished manuscripts in the Hemingway Collection of the John F. Kennedy Library, copyright 1986, Mary Hemingway, John Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway, and Gregory Hemingway. Those manuscripts will be identified by their item numbers in the Catalog of the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library (Boston: Hall, 1982).

  3 Peter Griffin’s Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) and Michael Reynolds’ The Young Hemingway (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) differ on what counts as a "Chicago" manuscript. Each cites eight of the thirteen considered here; Griffin adds another from the late 1920s (item 260), and Reynolds adds two that might be dated earlier (items 581, 634). Reynold’s selection, dating, and interpretation are trustworthy. Griffin’s dating is sometimes unsupported by manuscript evidence (see notes 13, 21). Jeffrey Meyers’ Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1985) does not consider these manuscripts.

  4 Griffin, Along with Youth, pp. 104, 112.

  5 Griffin, Along with Youth, pp. 125, 126.

  6 Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), p. 22.

  7 Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, p. 62.

  8 A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner’s, 1929), p. 18.

  9 Reynolds, The Young Hemingway, p. 58.

  10 Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, pp. 53, 55–56. Hemingway was immediately attracted to Edward Eric Dorman-Smith, a veteran of the war in France, when they met in early November 1918. He tried to match the true experiences of this veteran with some of his own inventions. James Gamble, Hemingway’s superior officer, entertained him during Christmas week at Taormina and later offered to support him for a year in Europe. Agnes von Kurowsky, the nurse Hemingway was in love with, scotched the offer by sending him home with the apparent promise to marry him. Jeffrey Meyers suggests she suspected that Gamble’s attraction was homosexual (Hemingway, p. 40).

  11 Griffin, Along with Youth, p. 203.

  12 "The Current" has its antecedents in Hemingway’s prewar fiction. Two sketches, "Bob Fitzpatrick . . ." (item 286A) and "John Wesley Marvin . . ." (item 532), share its style, Chicago setting, and story of a flawed hero uplifted (morally and from the mat) by some older adviser with the vision and experience of a Hanna Club speaker.

  13 The typescript, with the title Griffin gave it crossed out, has several of the sort of errors of omission and repetition one makes in a quick copy of another text. Its style is like nothing else Hemingway wrote, nor is it a parody. I suspect it is a rough copy of another person’s letter with Hemingway’s frame to ridicule its author and his windy idealism.

  14 A Farewell to Arms, pp. 18–19, 26–27, 30–31.

  15 The fictional citation, incidentally, repeats the story Hemingway told Dorman-Smith of leading a platoon into battle. Its language, however, is close to that of Hemingway’s own citation, reprinted in Robert W. Lewis, "Hemingway in Italy: Making it Up," Journal of Modern Literature 9 (1981–82): 22–24.

  16 (New York: Scribner’s, 1950), pp. 18–19.

  17 A Farewell to Arms, p. 20.

  18 There is an accidental mark of irony on the typescript of this story Hemingway circulated for comments. He added an autobiographical note describing himself as the "Late ist Lieut. ARC with [the] Italian Army. Wounded in Action July 8, 1918. Fossalta de Piave." One reader who found "laughs all through [the story] and a tear at the end," wondered rightly whether the author was dead or alive. Hemingway, of course, meant lately, but one might read this slip as his most serious, albeit unintentional, jest. The undated letter in the Kennedy Library’s Hemingway Collection is from "R McB" to Y. K. Smith, and the handwriting is very close to that in which corrections are made on item 445.

  19 Hemingway’s titles for other stories of this period, "The Woppian Way" and "The Ash Heels Tendon," for example, depend on ethnic or class slurs for their "humor." Here the title, at least in part, turns against both the characters and the narrator in the story.

  20 Another sketch, "Jock leaned out . . ." (item 531), recounts the story of a Red Cross officer, Brackell, who goes from post to post each day and tells the Italian commanders it is his birthday. He reaps the benefits of wine, capes, and pistols as presents, until he is finally caught out. The sketch ends with a glimpse of him, a short, swarthy fellow, "with a wicked eye."

  21 Ernest Hemingway: 88 Poems, ed. Nicholas Gerogiannis (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 37. The poem marked the occasion of Hadley’s gift of a Corona typewriter for Hemingway’s twenty-second birthday on July 21, 1921. The similar images and the corrections on the typescript (item 445) in a hand close to that of the letter cited above (note 18) to Y. K. Smith argue for a 1921 date for this story while
Hemingway was still on speaking terms with Y. K., probably sometime in the summer. Griffin, perhaps because of the fight at a bridge, dates this story sometime in the 1930s, anticipating For Whom the Bell Tolls (Along with Youth, p. 251).

  22 Hemingway originally placed Washington’s wound in the chest; someone else (R McB?) lowered it to the groin, providing us with an unlikely avatar for Jake Barnes.

  23 Michael Reynolds’ "Introduction: Looking Backward," Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s "In Our Time" (Boston: Hall, 1983), documents with the correspondence Hemingway’s deliberate imitation of Howe’s sketches in the fall of 1919. Compare Peter Griffin’s suggestion that the style of "Cross Roads" originated in the psychic wound Hemingway suffered when Agnes von Kurowsky jilted him six months earlier: "His sentences now were short and simple, the irony bitter and harsh, each word like his first steps without crutches or his cane." Along with Youth, p. 124.

  24 Griffin, Along with Youth, p. 125.

  25 The preceding four paragraphs summarize the argument in my "Three Versions of ‘Up in Michigan’: 1921–1930," Resources for American Literary Study (forthcoming).

  26 The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner’s, 1954), p. 289.

  Kenneth Lynn, “The Troubled Fisherman”

  1 EH to Howell Jenkins, c. September 15, 1919, in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner’s, 1981), p. 29.

  2 EH to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, August 15, 1924, Selected Letters, p. 122.

  3 Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition (New York: Scribner’s,) p. 163.

  4 Short Stories, p. 164.

  5 Short Stories, pp. 163, 164.

  6 Short Stories, p. 164.

  7 Short Stories, p. 167.

  8 Short Stories, p. 169.

  9 Short Stories, p. 177.

  10 Short Stories, p. 180.

  11 Short Stories, p. 180.

  12 The Portable Edmund Wilson, ed. Lewis M. Dabney (New York: Viking Press, 1983), p.399

  13 EH to Harvey Breit, July 23, 1956, Selected Letters, p. 867.

  14 Malcolm Cowley, ed., The Viking Portable Hemingway (New York: Viking Press, 1944), p. ix.

  15 Portable Hemingway, p. x.

  16 Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966), p. 5.

  17 A Reconsideration, p. 47.

  18 Mark Schorer, "Ernest Hemingway," in Major Writers of America, ed. Perry Miller (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1962), p. 675.

  19 Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner’s, 1964), p. 76.

  20 Malcolm Cowley, "Hemingway’s Wound," Georgia Review 38 (Summer 1984): 229–30.

  21 EH to Charles Poore, January 23, 1953, Selected Letters, p. 798.

  22 Norman Mailer, "The Big Bite," Esquire 58 (November 1962), p. 134.

  23 Norman Mailer, "Punching Papa," New York Review of Books 1 (August 1963): 13.

  Gerry Brenner, “From ‘Sepi Jingan’ to ‘The Mother of a Queen’: Hemingway’s Three, Epistemologic Formulas for Short Fiction“

  1 Kenneth S. Lynn, Hemingway (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 44.

  2 Michael S. Reynolds, The Young Hemingway (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 82–86.

  3 Reprinted in Ernest Hemingway’s Apprenticeship, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Washington, D.C.: NCR Microcard Editions, 1971), pp. 96–97; originally published in Tabula 22 (February 1916): 9–10.

  4 The textual perplexities in the story partly explain the steady flow of criticism the story generates, some of it historical—to "solve" the Stanley vs. Steve Ketchel problem— more of it interpretive, to "solve" the matter of which whore to believe. See, most recently, William J. Collins, "Taking on the Champion: Alice as Liar in ‘The Light of the World,’" Studies in American Fiction 14, no. 2 (1986): 225–32; and Howard L. Hannum, "Nick Adams and the Search for Light," Studies in Short Fiction 23, no. 1 (1986): 9–18.

  5 I refer here, of course, to Hemingway’s admission that he "had omitted the real end of [the story] which was that the old man hanged himself," A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner’s, 1962), p. 75. For a good discussion of how the doctor-daughter ambiguity informs the story’s issues, see Kenneth G. Johnston, "Hemingway’s ‘Out of Season’ and the Psychology of Errors," Literature and Psychology 21 (1971): 41–46, reprinted as " ‘Out of Season’; The Tip of the Iceberg" in his The Tip of the Iceberg: Hemingway and the Short Story (Greenwood, Fla.: Penkevill, 1987), pp. 29–38.

  6 For an insightful reading of this exercise in textual perplexity, see Michael Reynolds, "‘Homage to Switzerland’: Einstein’s Train Stops at Hemingway’s Station," in Hemingway’s Neglected Short Fiction: Current Perspectives (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989) pp. 255–62.

  7 For a brief discussion of this perplexity, see my Concealments in Hemingway’s Works (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), p. 239.

  8 A recent reading of the story is Kenneth G. Johnston’s "‘A Way You’ll Never Be’: A Mission of Morale," Studies in Short Fiction 23 (1986): 429–35; reprinted in his The Tip of the Iceberg, pp. 171–78.

  9 The commentators who have advanced this view are legion, making it a critical commonplace. But it continues to get advanced as though it were a fresh insight. See, for example, Stephen R. Portch’s "Silent Ernest," in his Literature’s Silent Language: Nonverbal Communication (New York: Peter Lang, 1985), pp. 89–116; Roger Whitlow, Cassandra’s Daughters: The Women in Hemingway (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), pp. 93–96; and Kenneth G. Johnston, The Tip of the Iceberg, pp. 125–31.

  10 Robert E. Fleming reads "Sea Change" as one of Hemingway’s stories about the transformative power of the artist in "Perversion and the Writer in ‘The Sea Change,’" Studies in American Fiction 14 (1986): 215–20.

  11 See my "A Semiotic Inquiry into Hemingway’s ‘A Simple Enquiry,’" in Susan F. Beegel, ed., Hemingway’s Neglected Short Fiction, pp. 195–207.

  12 Lynn contentiously argues that psychological readings of Nick "trying to block out fear-ridden recollections of being wounded" are unprovable, that "Nick’s state of mind [is] not to be found in the story," that all readings of the story that emphasize a "physically crippled" Nick derive from external information—other stories, Hemingway’s reconstructions, and gullible critics, 104–7. But Lynn pays no attention to the obsessively detailed account of Nick’s trek and his excessively methodical routines, both of which speak to some measure of neurotic compulsiveness in Nick. And he insists that some mention of the war must be in the text to warrant the insights that Malcolm Cowley first brought to it, ignoring the khaki shirtpocket as sufficient synecdoche.

  13 Peter J. Rabinowitz discusses this aspect of theories of reading in Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987).

  14 Susan Beegel discusses the removal of the story’s "thinking theme" in her " ‘Mutilated by Scott Fitzgerald?’: The Revision of Hemingway’s ‘Fifty Grand,’" in her Hemingway’s Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), pp. 15–18.

  15 Susan F. Beegel discusses the background and composition history of this story in "‘Just Skillful Reporting?’: Fact and Fiction in ‘After the Storm,’" in her Hemingway’s Craft of Omission, pp. 69–88.

  16 Brenner, Concealments, pp. 8–9.

  17 In his essay, "The Art of the Short Story," Paris Review 79 (1981): 93–94, Hemingway is unequivocal that "the woman, who [sic] I knew very well in real life but then invented out of, to make the woman for this story, is a bitch for the full course and doesn’t change. . . . The woman called Margot Macomber is no good to anybody now except for trouble."

  18 See William White, "‘Macomber’ Bibliography," Hemingway Notes 5 (1980): 35–38, and Earl Rovit and Gerry Brenner, Ernest Hemingway, rev. ed. (Boston: Twayne, 1986), p. 185.

 
; 19 The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner’s, 1987), p. 317; subsequent quotations from the story are from this edition.

  20 Charles Stetler and Gerald Locklin, "Beneath the Tip of the Iceberg in Hemingway’s ‘The Mother of a Queen,’" Hemingway Review 2 (1982): 68–69.

  21 For Kenneth Lynn the mother of the story is Grace Hemingway, and in it "Hemingway updated his quarrel with Grace by dealing symbolically with their current financial relationship; unfortunately, its account of a young homosexual who stops paying the rent on his mother’s grave and allows her remains to be dumped on a public bone-heap was nothing but a revolting expression of a famous man’s resentment at having to send a woman he hated a monthly allowance," p. 408.

  22 See, for example, his letter to Harvey Breit, July 23, 1956, which ridicules Charles A. Fenton, Carlos Baker, Philip Young, and Malcolm Cowley, in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner’s, 1981), pp. 866–67.

  23 Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, eds., Faulkner in the University (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), p. 149.

  24 Lynn, Hemingway, p. 408.

  Steven K. Hoffman, “Nada and the Clean, Well-Lighted Place: The Unity of Hemingway’s Short Fiction”

  1 Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, fourth ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 128.

  2 Baker, p. 124.

  3 Of course, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is not the only story in Winner Take Nothing (New York: Scribner’s, 1933) that conveys the sense of desolation. "After the Storm," "The Light of the World," "A Natural History of the Dead," and "A Way You’ll Never Be" are apt companion pieces, and Hemingway’s epigraph firmly sets the tone for the entire collection:

  Unlike all other forms of lutte or combat the conditions are that the winner shall take nothing; neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notions of glory; nor, if he win far enough, shall there be any reward within himself.