Although many literary critics have concluded that Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, others find his work remote, depressing, and difficult to grasp. As a remedy for these later concerns, I recommend a comprehensive examination of Hemingway’s earliest short stories. I believe that these are his most focused works and that they contain all the powerful stylistic elements and themes found later in his more well-known and appreciated novels, such as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bells, and The Old Man and the Sea— for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
Although his short stories were originally published in various formats from the 1930’s to 1960’s, the most comprehensive collection is contained in the Finca Vigia edition, which was edited by his sons, John, Patrick, and Gregory and published by Charles Scribner in 1987. Finca Vigia was the name of Hemingway’s home in Cuba for over twenty years, beginning in 1940. Amazingly, the house still is maintained as Hemingway left it in 1960, and promoted by the Cuban government, despite strained relations it has maintained with the United States up through the present period. Vigia, in Spanish, means a lookout or a prospect, and according to the Preface of the book, “The farmhouse is built on a hill that commands an unobstructed view of Havana and the coastal plains to the north. Some of Hemingway’s most famous works were written either partly or entirely at that home. In the Introduction, his sons noted, “Although the Finca Vigía collection contains all the stories that appeared in the first comprehensive collection of Papa’s short stories published in 1938, those stories are now well-known. Much of this collection’s interest to the reader will no doubt be in the stories that were written or only came to light after he came to live at the Finca Vigía.”
The first group of these stories was originally called “The First Forty-Nine.” At present, I am teaching 2 two-hour classes on about 10 of these stories at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute on the University of Richmond (Virginia) Campus and will comment on them here after discussing them. These stories, known as the Nick Adams series, have been published in separate volumes, and focus on a character created by Hemingway to capture his memories of frequent family excursions to Northern Michigan. For the most part, those stories deal with subjects the man loved best: camping, hunting, and fishing with his friends and father. He and his family had several interactions, both positive and negative, dealing with various tribes living in Northern Michigan. Reflecting these experiences, the Nick Adams tales begin in “Indian Camp, where a ten-year-old Nick takes a ‘coming of age’ voyage with his doctor-father to witness the cesarean delivery of an Indian woman’s baby. In “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” young Nick observes his father arguing with an Indian over who has the rights to some logs from a timber company which has floated on the Hemingway’s property. The story provides insights that there were tensions between Nick’s father and mother. In “The End of Something” Nick is twenty years old and sloppily handles the breakup with his first serious girlfriend, Marjorie, age 17. He feels that she is too independent and controlling and that he has to escape this dying relationship and declining town to fulfill his greater mission.
In Hemingway’s actual life, he signed up as an ambulance and was seriously wounded as part of the Italian army in 1918, when he would have been 19. Those experiences were vividly captured in Hemingway’s highly acclaimed novel, A Farewell to Arms. If “The End of Something” reflects Hemingway’s life, it would have been based on the period after he returned home from World War I. “Big Two-Hearted River – Parts I and II” more clearly portrays the period directly after Nick returned from the war. They show that he felt that he needed to heal and resume the activities he most fondly recalled as a young boy before resuming the rest of his life. Echoing the structure of Thoreau’s, Walden Pond, these stories demonstrate how nature was a healing force for Nick and how it both helped him to bring forward and then wash away the scarring memories of the war. Although “Soldier’s Home” is not technically a Nick Adams story, it reflects Hemingway’s awareness of the difficulties that soldiers who returned home after the war to a world that had changed beyond their ability to adjust to it. That story highlights some of the themes that were found in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story, “The Jellybean.” As noted by the participants in my Osher class, both stories are still timely today, as veterans return from various wars. An enlightening bookend to the Adams series is called “Fathers and Sons” and shows Nick as a father traveling in a car to a camping trip back to Northern Michigan., where his son expresses an unexpected wish to visit his grandfather’s grave.
Two other non-Nick Adams stories in this collection highlighting Hemingway’s war-related memories are “Hills Like White Elephants” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” An anomaly in this group focuses on the tensions of an ill-suited couple on African safari-where readers can expect to take sides in a possible murder-mystery. In my next columns, I will discuss some of the short stories and elaborate on how readers can identify several of the most important stylistic elements and common themes found in this collection, as well as in Hemingway’s more recognized novels. I also welcome readers to send commentaries and question in the dialogue box after each of these columns.
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