professionalism of physicians (and its limitation and breakdown under duress), seen
as early as “ Indian Camp ” and A Farewell to Arms , resurfaces in “ God Rest You Merry,
Gentlemen ” (1933). Set in Kansas City, this story centers on the reactions of two
ambulance surgeons to the situation of a boy who, out of a deep Pauline sense of
sinning against purity, mutilates himself. The story draws complexly on Christian
materials, as does “ The Light of the World, ” in which Hemingway tests the Christian
notion of charity, as expressed in Jesus ’ s imprecation to those who would honor him
that they do so by extending charity “ unto the least ” of humankind. Do the obliga-
tions of charity extend to the whore, large as “ a hay mow ” ? Does it apply to the
“ sisters, ” exemplifi ed in men who put lemon juice on their hands to keep them white
and soft?
Filial and parental relationships, a staple in Hemingway
’
s work from
“
Indian
Camp ” to the posthumously published novel Islands in the Stream (1970), inform two
stories in Winner Take Nothing : “ A Day ’ s Wait ” and “ Fathers and Sons. ” “ A Day ’ s
Wait, ” which Hemingway insisted was transcribed directly from experience, is struc-
tured around a surprising revelation. A sick child has confused a Fahrenheit tempera-
ture reading for centigrade and consequently thinks he is at death ’ s door. This tightly
controlled story presents an indelible image of the child as “ a little man ” whose tight -
lipped bravery as he faces death gives way, after the mistake over temperatures is
discovered and cleared away, to crying “ very easily at little things that were of no
importance. ” In “ Fathers and Sons ” Nick Adams, now aged 38, has a son of his own.
The roles of son to father in “ Indian Camp ” and “ The Doctor and the Doctor ’ s Wife ”
are repeated, but now it is Nick who would coach and teach the child who wants to
The Hemingway Story
235
know about his grandfather. If we go by age, this is the oldest Nick we meet in
Hemingway ’ s fi ction.
The theme of heterosexual confl ict and complexity is again taken up in “ The Sea
Change ” (1931), but with a twist that is particularly interesting for Hemingway. As
in “ Hills Like White Elephants, ” the story takes place in a bar. The woman is about
to leave the man for someone else. They argue until the man says angrily, “ ‘ I ’ ll kill
her ’ ” (302). After more arguing, the woman walks away. The man ’ s reaction to what
is happening is the focal point of the story. It ends with a note on his behavior after
the woman has left. He talks to the barman and then, insisting that he is “ a different
man, ” stares at himself in the mirror. Even the potential for irony in the barman ’ s
closing observation, “ You must have had a very good summer, ” does not detract from
the story ’ s shift away from the woman ’ s sexual choice to the man ’ s narcissism (304).
Published in Scribner ’ s Magazine as “ Give Us a Prescription, Doctor ” (1933), “ The
Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio ” is a Depression story about the illusions and delu-
sions that are humankind
’
s opiates. The neurotic, jumpy hospital patient whose
central consciousness structures the narrative lists them: religion, music, economics,
patriotism, sexual intercourse, drink ( “ an excellent opium ” ), the radio ( “ a cheap one ” ),
gambling, ambition, new forms of government, and bread ( “ the real, the actual, opium
of the people ” ) (367). The opiate he, a writer, does not mention, is writing. There is
much in this signifi cant story that recalls the Hemingway most familiar to readers
– the hospital setting; the frazzled, neurotic center of consciousness; the expressions
of anxiety and despair. Never a favorite with critics, it continues to suffer from critical
and interpretive neglect.
Hemingway ’ s most memorable story of despair, however, is the widely antholo-
gized “ A Clean, Well - Lighted Place ” (1933). Told in the third person, the story is
set in Spain, fi rst in a cafe and then, briefl y, in a bar. Its principal is a so - called “ old
waiter ” who fi rst converses with a younger colleague and then has a brief exchange
with a barman. What is revealed is that the two cafe waiters see life differently. The
younger one has what he calls “ confi dence ” ; the older one does not (290). They talk
about an old man who drinks at the cafe, revealing that he has tried to commit suicide
but was saved by a niece who feared for his soul. The reader gradually discovers that
it is the “ older waiter ” the author would have us attend to. He questions himself:
“ What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well.
It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it
needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he
knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada ” (291). Then, in one of the most
famous passages in all of Hemingway ’ s writings, he breaks into a nihilistic parody of
the Christian prayer: “ Our nada who art in nada , nada be thy name thy Kingdom
nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada . Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada ; pues nada ” (291). The waiter has replaced with “ nada ” nouns and verbs that
suggest things and attributes – father, heaven, hallowed, come, done, earth, heaven,
day, bread, forgive, trespasses, forgive, enemies, lead, temptation, evil, and amen (so
236
George Monteiro
be it). From the waiter ’ s point of view, alone or collectively they add up to nothing.
Belief in the existence of such entities, like belief in the effi cacy of prayers to the Lord
or the Virgin, are – to borrow terms from “ The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio ”
– opiates of the people. The story ends with a characteristic irony as the waiter wryly
dismisses his despairing thoughts: “ After all, he said to himself, it is probably only
insomnia. Many must have it ” (291).
In 1935 Hemingway published Green Hills of Africa , an account of his experiences
on a big - game hunting trip he had taken with his second wife, Pauline. He explained
that the book was an experiment in writing intended to bridge the worlds of factual
experience and fi ctional creation; that is, he had invented neither characters nor inci-
dents, but had selected his material and so shaped it to see if a work of fact could
compete with a work of fi ction on the latter ’ s own grounds. Out of that African safari
also came the germ for two stories that would become virtually synonymous with the
name of Hemingway: “ The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber ” ( Cosmopolitan ,
1934) and “ The Snows of Kilimanjaro ” ( Esquire , 1936). No other work of fi ction by
Hemingway has been more critically controversial as “ The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber. ” That it is a tightly controlled narrative of the title character ’ s coming of
age – a psychological baptism in which he behaves courageously in the face of poten-
tial violent death – has seldom been questioned (although one critic was disturbed
that Hemingway had chosen, at certain moments, to write from the point of view of
the lion). Rather, the controversy has waxed, at times hotly, over the precise nature
of Mrs. Macomber ’ s character and whether or not, when she kills her husband, she
has committed murder. The narrative overall seems to indicate that Margot Macomber,
who uses infi delity and a sharp tongue to humiliate her diffi dent and at times cowardly
husband into subservience in what has obviously been a disastrous marriage, might
very well murder a husband whose conquest of his fear of the animals he hunts is
emblematic of his acquisition of control over the way he will live his life. But in one
sentence describing what Wilson, the white hunter, calls, sardonically, “ the manner
of the accident
”
(28), Hemingway set interpretive hares that are still running.
“ Macomber had stood solid and shot for the nose, shooting a touch high each time
and hitting the heavy horns, splintering and chipping them like hitting a slate roof,
and Mrs. Macomber, in the car, had shot at the buffalo with the 6.5 Mannlicher as
it seemed about to gore Macomber and hit her husband about two inches up and a
little to one side of the base of his skull ” (28). The immediate aftermath of this “ acci-
dent ” is that the guide bullies and taunts the woman who is “ crying hysterically. ” In
an exchange replete with irony, he tells her, “ Of course it ’ s an accident, ” but then
asks her accusingly, “ Why didn ’ t you poison him? ” (28). When the author was asked
about the matter, he said that he simply did not know, that he could have found out
but did not want to probe deeper into the case. As the guide says, there will be an
inquest (and indeed in The Macomber Affair , a 1947 fi lm based on the story, the entire
narrative is presented within the framing situation of an inquest) that will, through
legal procedure, decide whether Macomber ’ s death was accidental or homicidal. But
Hemingway chose to stop short of such an inquest, because the legal determination,
The Hemingway Story
237
whatever the verdict, would be beside the point. Hemingway ends his story with
mystery, not the detective ’ s, but the psychological moralist ’ s. When this hard woman
unexpectedly collapses into hysteria and falls into subservience before the white
hunter, the reader witnesses the uncovering of a depth in Mrs. Macomber ’ s character
that even she had not expected or feared. Can she, let alone the reader (or the author),
ever know whether in her heart of hearts she had not only been capable of murdering
her husband but, in the only way that morally and personally counts, had actually
done so?
“ The Snows of Kilimanjaro, ” Hemingway ’ s most complexly arranged narrative and
his most consciously symbolic story up to that time, dramatizes the fi nal hours in the
life of a failed writer who fi nds himself dying from infection as he futilely awaits the
plane that would fl y him out of this hunting encampment to the medical treatment
that could save his gangrenous leg and his life. Except for the exchanges between the
writer and his attending wife, the narrative consists of a long self - examination on the
part of the writer in which he mixes memories of incidents and personages with judg-
ments of his past. Printed in italics, these memories, the reader soon discovers, are
biographical, constituting materials that the backslider writer, having betrayed his
talent, has hitherto failed to turn into art. Recognizing and facing up to his self -
deluding rationalization for marrying into the tribe of “ the rich ” and living among
them, namely that he would study them so that he could write about them, the writer
in extremis confesses to himself.
To get at the matter, Hemingway employs a double - ending, fi rst, an apocalypse
in which the writer experiences the arrival of the salvifi c airplane and which ends with
his perception that he is going directly to the square top of Kilimanjaro, and secondly,
closing out the narrative, a bit of symbolic naturalism, in which his wife could see
the writer ’ s “ bulk under the mosquito bar but somehow he had gotten his leg out
and it hung down alongside the cot. The dressings had all come down and she could
not look at it ” (56). At the last, the act of writing gets the moral right. Notation no
longer even matters. At his death the author is once again a writer – a minimalist
“ telescoping ” his “ stories ” into a paragraph or two. 7 The mystery of the leopard whose
carcass, dried and frozen, was found close to the western summit of Kilimanjaro (as
indicated in the epigraph) lends itself to unresolved interpretations, both naturalistic
and apocalyptic. About the nature of the writer
’
s fi nal, if implicit, judgment of
himself, however, there is no doubt; he has become the writer he should have been
all along, once again composing his stories.
Hemingway ’ s African stories were not collected in book form until 1938, when
Scribner ’ s published The Fifth Column and the First Forty - Nine Stories (1938) . The “ fi rst
forty - nine stories ” included, besides “ Macomber ” and “ Snows, ” and the stories from
the three collections, In Our Time , Men Without Women , and Winner Take Nothing , as
well as “ Up in Michigan ” (1923) and two stories set in Spain: “ Old Man at the Bridge ”
and “ The Capital of the World, ” the latter telling the story of a mock bullfi ght, held
in a restaurant, in which a young boy, “ full of illusions, ” is accidentally killed. Nearly
all the short stories Hemingway had published to date were included in this volume.
238
George Monteiro
In hand, however, he had another four stories of the Spanish Civil War – “ The Denun-
ciation ” (1938), “ The Butterfl y and Tank ” (1938), “ Night Before Battle ” (1939), and
“ Under the Ridge ” (1939) – which were collected only after Hemingway ’ s death. In
1969 Scribner ’ s issued them, along with Hemingway ’ s play, as The Fifth Column and
Four Unpublished Stories of the Spanish Civil War , a title that contradicts the fact that
these stories had all appeared in journals in the 1930s.
The 1938 preface that Hemingway wrote for The First Forty - Nine Stories concludes
with the statement that the author “ would like to live long enough to write three
more novels and twenty - fi ve more stories. I know some pretty good ones ” (4). He did
produce and publish the three novels – if included among them is The Old Man and
the Sea , the novella for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, along with For Whom the
Bell Tolls (1940) and Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), the story of a US Army
colonel ’ s last days in Venice. The posthumous publication of his works includes the
novels Islands in the Stream (1970), the account of a painter ’ s domestic relationships
and wartime exploits, and The Garden of Eden (1986), a story of psychological disin-
tegration culled from manuscripts relating to Americans living in France in the 1920s,
as well True at First Light (1999), African materials put t
ogether by his son, Patrick
Hemingway. But “ twenty - fi ve ” was a number he did not begin to approach. Towards
that number he left two fables, “ The Good Lion ” (1951, Hemingway Reader ), in which
a lion drinks martinis at Harry ’ s Bar in Venice, and “ The Faithful Bull ” ( Fortune ,
1951), several uncollected stories, such as “ Nobody Ever Dies! ” ( Cosmopolitan , 1939),
and two stories that appeared in the November 1957 Atlantic Monthly (under the
heading “ Two Titles of Darkness, ” ) “ A Man of the World ” and “ Get a Seeing - Eyed
Dog, ” and a few other unpublished stories. Although there were indications, especially
after Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, that there
would be a new edition of his collected stories (Hemingway even went so far as to
write an introductory piece, “ The Art of the Short Story, ” which remained unpub-
lished until it appeared in the Paris Review in 1981), no such collection materialized
in Hemingway ’ s lifetime.
Only in 1987, in fact, did Scribner ’ s issue an enlarged edition of Hemingway ’ s
short fi ction. As the publisher ’ s preface acknowledges, there had “ long been a need
for a complete and up - to - date edition of the short stories of Ernest Hemingway. ”
Unfortunately, this publication was not that long - needed edition. The Complete Short
Stories of Ernest Hemingway was misnamed, for not all of Hemingway ’ s stories were
included, while excerpts from unpublished manuscripts of unfi nished novels were.
The stories from The Fifth Column and the First Forty - Nine Stories volume were included,
along with “ The Denunciation, ” “ The Butterfl y and the Tank, ” “ Night Before Battle, ”
“ Under the Ridge, ” “ Nobody Ever Dies!, ” “ Get a Seeing - Eyed Dog ” (a sequel to “ The
Sea Change ” ), “ A Man of the World, ” “ The Summer People, ” and “ The Last Good
Country, ” the fi nal two fi rst published in The Nick Adams Stories . From the novel The
Garden of Eden , itself an editorial arrangement of extracts from an unpublished manu-
script, the editors culled “ An African Story. ” The two fables “ The Good Lion ” and
“ The Faithful Bull ” were included, as well as “ One Trip Across ” and “ The Tradesman ’ s
A Companion to the American Short Story Page 52
