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Book Reviews |
Off the Shelf with Mike Foster
In Our Time
Ernest Hemingway, 1925
According to a well-respected scholar, G.K.
Chesterton never mentioned Ernest Hemingway.
So perhaps he never knew that in "The Three-Day Blow," one
of the better stories in Hemingway's first book, Nick Adams (a character
clearly based on the author) lauds him as "about the best guy there is.
Do you remember The Flying Inn?"
And Nick's friend Bill seconds the motion by misquoting from memory:
"If an angel out of heaven
Gives you something else to drink,
Thank him for his kind intentions;
Go and pour them down the sink.'"
"That's right," said Nick. "I guess he's a better guy than Walpole—Chesterton's
a classic."
Of course, the fact that this praise comes from two teenaged boys well on their way to getting hammered on Bill's dad's Irish whisky might temper their vision of Chesterton as fishing buddy.
They'd been discussing the futility of the St. Louis Cardinals, and just after, with their third stout drink, they raise toasts to fishing, Walpole, and Chesterton—right before Bill says the wrong thing about the girl Nick just broke up with.
This story is the fourth of ten in this collection of 15 that together comprise the education of Nick Adams. Here Nick is learning about heartbreaking and self-inflicted loss, as well as about whiskey.
In "Indian Camp," the second story, Nick, then a boy of about 7, is brought by his doctor father to learn how babies are born by witnessing a birth. This unwanted lesson is superseded by a more horrible one, of suicide by knife.
Of the five non-Nick stories, two are longer expositions of the one-page
italicized impressionistic "Chapters" between each story. These read like
bits of unused war correspondent notes from Hemingway's reportage covering
the Greco-Turkish war and bullfights for the Toronto Star. "On the Quai
at Smyrna," the first story, begins with the chilling "The strange thing
was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight. I don't know
why they screamed."
Like this writer, beginning as a cub reporter at age 18, Hemingway learned much about practical writing from newspaper editors. His style's strength is its simplicity. Adverbs are rarer than steak tartare. Hemingway left emotions out, believing if his description was good enough, the reader would supply the emotion without being prompted.
Thus the menace of Nick's encounter with the punch-drunk ex-boxer in "The Battler" and the sudden love suddenly lost shared by a wounded Nick and a nurse in Padua conveyed in the seven exquisitely economical paragraphs of "A Very Short Story" succeed on spare but vivid dialogue and detail. What is unsaid matters in "The End of Something," the prequel to "The Three-Day Blow," when Nick breaks it off with Marjorie, his first girl, with taciturn cruelty.
In In Our Time's last story, the two-part "Big Two-Hearted River," Nick returns to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, site of the first stories. There, alone, freed of friend, stranger, or lover, he fishes the Fox River (which Hemingway renamed after another nearby river, perhaps symbolizing these stories' ambivalent views of life and death, perhaps just because it sounded better) near Seney. Nick catches some fish, but the biggest one gets away. The author would autoplagiarize that story thirty years later for the 1953 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Old Man and the Sea.
Ernest Hemingway is the Johnny Cash of American fiction: masculine, stark, grave, grim. Like the revered Cash, he is at once a true original voice and a shrewd self-iconized celebrity: Papa Hemingway, meet The Man in Black.
But here, just 25 years old, he gives readers the equivalent of Johnny
Cash's Sun recordings: reverberant, authentic, and unforgettable. 