Hemingway's Neglected Short Fiction: New Perspectives
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Hemingway's Neglected Short Fiction: New Perspectives
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Overview
Reveal a range of voices, narrative strategies, and fictional interests more wide-ranging and experimental than any other extant work of Hemingway’s
In 1924 Ernest Hemingway published a small book of eighteen vignettes, each little more than one page long, with a small press in Paris. Titled in our time, the volume was later absorbed into Hemingway’s story collection In Our Time. Those vignettes, as Milton Cohen demonstrates in Hemingway’s Laboratory, reveal a range of voices, narrative strategies, and fictional interests more wide-ranging and experimental than any other extant work of Hemingway’s. Further, they provide a vivid view of his earliest tendencies and influences, first manifestations of the style that would become his hallmark, and daring departures into narrative forms that he would forever leave behind.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817389062 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 12/05/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Hemingway's Neglected Short Fiction
New Perspectives
By Susan F. Beegel
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1989 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8906-2
CHAPTER 1
"The Mercenaries": A Harbinger of Vintage Hemingway
Mimi Reisel Gladstein
This anthology begins with Mimi Reisel Gladstein's consideration of a very early short story, "The Mercenaries," written in 1919, when Hemingway was just 20 years old, but unpublished until 1985, when Peter Griffin included the piece in his biography, Along with Youth: Hemingway, The Early Years. Because Hemingway wrote "The Mercenaries" when his sole writing experience was that of cub reporter for the Kansas City Star; well before his Paris apprenticeship to Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and others, the short story offers an excellent opportunity to study a Hemingway as yet unmolded by the literary influences that were to shape his career. Gladstein takes advantage of this opportunity. In the midst of the youthful melodrama of "The Mercenaries"—the story features a duel over a signora with "eyes like inkwells and full red lips"—Gladstein discovers many themes, character types, plot lines, and stylistic devices destined to characterize Hemingway's best work in future, and locates the author's essence in his juvenilia.
A distinguishing feature of recent Hemingway study is the proportion of attention being paid to the writer's early life and writing apprenticeship. Two major recent biographies are dedicated solely to the period prior to his marrying Hadley Richardson, shortly after his twenty-second birthday: 1985 saw the publication of Peter Griffin's Along With Youth: Hemingway, The Early Years, and Michael Reynolds's The Young Hemingway followed in 1986. Both studies add much to our understanding of the factors and forces that contributed to the maturation of the young man who was to create a revolution in twentieth-century literary style.
Along With Youth has particular appeal for readers who do not normally have access to special collections and unpublished materials because it includes five previously unpublished Hemingway short stories. These are "The Mercenaries—A Story," "Crossroads," "Portrait of an Idealist in Love," "The Ash Heel's Tendon," and "The Current." Griffin calls "The Mercenaries" the best of the lot. He tells us little more about it except that it was rejected by both Redbook and Saturday Evening Post.
Griffin's placement of the story in his text indicates that it was written shortly after Hemingway's return from Italy and before Agnes von Kurowsky broke their engagement, written perhaps as part of his plan to earn a nest egg for their forthcoming marriage. Evidence from the manuscripts themselves suggests a later genesis. Item 572 in the Ernest Hemingway Papers at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library is headed with a 602 State Street, Petoskey, Michigan address. This item is definitely identified as an Ernest Hemingway typescript. Hemingway was not in Petoskey until October of 1919. Agnes's rejection letter came much earlier, in March of that year. A second, more carefully typed manuscript, item 573, is headed with a 600 N. Kenilworth, Oak Park, Illinois address. In all likelihood this is a later version as it contains corrections inked in on item 572. There are also differences between the text as Griffin publishes it and the Kennedy Library manuscripts. Griffin does not provide any information about the rationale for his editorial revisions.
Whatever its correct dating and exact text, "The Mercenaries" was not among the works that Hemingway took with him to Paris. After the story was rejected twice, he withdrew it from circulation and never worked with it again, even after what Kenneth G. Johnston calls the "fortunate loss" of all of his typescripts and manuscripts in the Paris train station. Hemingway's decision to withdraw the story from circulation is evidence of his early editorial astuteness and judgment. The quality of "The Mercenaries" is not equal to that of the writing Hemingway did a few years later. Still, while I agree with Robert W. Lewis's evaluation of the story as an interesting apprentice work, I cannot agree with his dismissal of it as one that "hardly adumbrates Hemingway's published work of In Our Time five years later." What is most interesting about "The Mercenaries" is the way it prefigures not so much In Our Time specifically, but many of Hemingway's other short stories and novels. One can argue that, for all its faults, "The Mercenaries" anticipates many of its author's prevailing themes, character types, and plot lines. While lacking technical sophistication and that stylistic economy that characterizes vintage Hemingway, it is still interesting not only as juvenilia but also as a harbinger of what was to come.
Like many quintessential Hemingway stories, "The Mercenaries" is a tale of men without women. Its characters are indicative of the kinds of characters who would continue to populate the Hemingway world. As early as 1919 we find that Hemingway did not often choose to focus on the activities of ordinary individuals who would be familiar to the average reader. Like the bullfighters, big-game hunters, and demolitions experts of future fame, the characters in "The Mercenaries" are engaged in death-challenging enterprises. In this case, the main characters are the soldiers of fortune named in the title. The behavior of a French artillery lieutenant named Denis Ricaud is more reserved and genteel than that of his American companion, Sergeant Perry Graves, and that of the narrator, one Rinaldi Rinaldo, an Italian-American who has spent three years in Italy during the war. We learn nothing about these characters from the narration; everything we know is revealed dramatically through the dialog, a technique Hemingway was to use most effectively later.
Another element characteristic of later stories already in place in this early effort is the de rigueur drinking scene, complete with discussions of the relative merits of various alcoholic beverages, indicating the relative sophistication of the various characters. The most hardened of the mercenaries orders absinthe for all, and although Rinaldi identifies it as "that smooth, insidious, brain-rotting mixture," he makes no effort to countermand the order.
Rinaldi is a name that appealed to Hemingway. He resurrected it twice in his published fiction, most notably in A Farewell to Arms, but also earlier in in our time. In "The Mercenaries" Hemingway uses the name for his narrator, who does little other than listen. The character who bears that name in the sketch in in our time is also a listener, this time "a disappointing audience" for Nick's assertion of "a separate peace." The Rinaldi of in our time makes no comment when Nick tells him "We're not patriots," although he may in fact be unable to reply as he is wounded, lying face down in the dirt, "breathing with difficulty." Likewise, the Rinaldi of "The Mercenaries" makes no response to Perry Graves's question after the story of Graves's duel with Il Lupo, although as narrator he tells us that he was thinking about "how this leather-faced old adventurer had matched his courage against admittedly one of the most fearless men in Europe" (111).
The matter of Rinaldi's name is one of the unaccountable editorial changes Griffin makes from the Kennedy Library manuscript. In the original the character is called Rinaldi Rinaldo; Griffin's version changes the name to Rinaldi Renaldo, a change that affects the pronunciation and also makes the name different from the name Hemingway would use later for the Italian doctor in A Farewell to Arms and the wounded Italian soldier in in our time. Manuscripts at the Kennedy Library suggest that Hemingway meant the name to be the same in all three places. The reason for Griffin's alteration of Hemingway's spelling is not given, although it seems an intentional revision as Griffin also changes an i to an e the first time Graves mispronounces the name and calls Rinaldo "Risolvo." Here Griffin changes Risolvo to Resolvo.
In some ways, the narrator of "The Mercenaries" and Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises function similarly. Jake brings his friends to Pamplona where he is obviously one of the cognoscenti. In the course of the story, the friends and the reader gain knowledge about and entrance to the world of bullfighting and its attendant rituals and ceremonies. Jake's friends are suffered at the Hotel Montoya because of Jake. Montoya, who serves as the high priest of the aficionados, has concluded that Jake has aficion, and therefore Jake is invited where ordinary American tourists are excluded. Rinaldi in "The Mercenaries" is also one of the cognoscenti. He is allowed to pass through the dining room full of neobohemians and enter the rear room where the hardened soldiers of fortune gather. This he does because he is "recognized favourably" by Cambrinus. In "The Mercenaries" it does not matter if one is known or unknown to the group; being passed by Cambrinus gains one ready access to the back room. Ricaud and Perry immediately invite Rinaldi to join them because he is "armed with a smile from Cambrinus himself" (105). What Hemingway accomplishes here and what he was to do again in The Sun Also Rises is create a sense of an in-group.
Part of the appeal of Hemingway's writing is the opportunity it gives the reader to participate in a world totally unlike the mundane or everyday. In "The Mercenaries," the appeal of the exotic and the dangerous is used blatantly in the first sentence as the reader is invited to learn about "pearl fishing in the Marquesas," "employment on the projected Trans Gobi Desert Railway, or the potentialities of any of the hot tamale republics" (104). This is not a world for the fainthearted. Similarly, the first sentence of the first story in the collection In Our Time, "On the Quai at Smyrna," immediately evokes the horror of war: "The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight." The first of the interchapters or sketches is also set in war, in unfamiliar terrain, in this case the Champagne. While the majority of the In Our Time stories take place on native ground, almost all of the interchapters are set on foreign turf and have to do with death.
The nature of bravery is a major theme running through Hemingway's work, and "The Mercenaries" establishes an early genesis of this theme. In much of Hemingway's fiction, the measure of a man is the way he faces death, whether it be in battle, in the bullring, hunting big game, or alone on the vast ocean. Francis Macomber, Ole Andreson, Pedro Romero, Robert Jordan, Colonel Cantwell, and Santiago come easily to mind. The centerpiece of "The Mercenaries" is the story of how Perry Graves and Il Lupo face the prospect of sudden and violent death and what that means about each one's courage. If they were the only characters faced with mortality in the story, "The Mercenaries" would be less interesting than it is. There is, however, another important death-facing character in the story, and in that character's reaction to the story of the duel between Graves and Il Lupo there is an intimation of Hemingway's more mature narrative techniques and characterizations.
In their dismissal of "The Mercenaries," most critics have neglected the character of Denis Ricaud. Reynolds calls the story "a barracks-room tale" that communicates "none of the fear or horror that Hemingway discovered in Italy." Reynolds does not mention the role played by Ricaud in the story. Neither Paul Smith nor Robert W. Lewis discusses Ricaud. Yet, Ricaud is in many ways the most intriguing character in the story. Rinaldi's character is a cipher. The reader does not learn why he is at the Café Cambrinus or what his future plans are. We learn only that his grandfather was Italian and that he himself was not in the artillery. He is there mainly as a device for getting the story told. Sergeant Perry Graves is a poorly realized character, a cartoon cutout created to retell the fantasy Hemingway made up for Chink Dorman-Smith to account for the week he spent with Jim Gamble in Taormina. His characterization is inconsistent, and the failure of the Graves character may well account for the failure of the story.
Ricaud is another matter. In his assessments and telling comments, he prefigures such characters as Count Mippipopolous in The Sun Also Rises and even Count Greffi in A Farewell to Arms. Like Mippipopolous, Ricaud has patrician manners that stand in opposition to the drunken gaucherie and carelessness of those about him. In The Sun Also Rises, though Brett labels the Count as "one of us," the Count's behavior while they are drinking and dining together is quite different from hers. In Jake's apartment she flicks her ashes on the rug until she sees Jake notice it and then asks for an ashtray. The Count does not take out his cigar until ashtrays are present, and then he takes it out of a heavy, pigskin cigar case. He cuts the cigar with a gold cutter, having first offered a cigar to Jake. In "The Mercenaries," Graves offers Rinaldi a package of cheap cigarettes, shoving them across the table at him. Ricaud politely suggests that Rinaldi might prefer one of his cigarettes. He offers them out of a "monogrammed cigarette box," which he slides across the table with his "small, well-manicured hand" (105). As if the difference in class between Graves and Ricaud were not made clear enough by this initial action, later in the story Graves indicates that his taste in cigarettes is symbolic of his status in life. In explaining why he was demoted to sergeant from his wartime rank of captain, Graves says, "I was an officer, but not a gentleman. I could command a battery, but I've got a rotten taste in cigarettes" (108).
While characters like Jake are trying to learn "how to live," the Count has already gotten "to know the values." Having lived through seven wars and four revolutions, the Count enjoys himself with good food and wine and company. His quiet sense of self is juxtaposed with the frenetic frustration of Jake's circle. In "The Mercenaries," Ricaud's comment after Graves's story anticipates Count Mippipopolous's contention that having "lived very much" has allowed him to "get to know the values." Ricaud, who provides the only penetrating commentary in the story on the question of bravery, uses the word "standards" instead of the word "values." In Ricaud's explanation, "It is a question of standards" (111). Having died in his imagination a thousand times during his wartime experiences and expecting that he will imagine many more deaths before he is buried, Ricaud understands the character of Il Lupo, whose bravery is called into question by his behavior in the duel with Graves. Il Lupo has behaved courageously in war, bringing the Austrian ace Von Hauser "back alive to the Italian lines, his guns jammed, his observer dead in the cockpit" (107). Ricaud understands the problem to be one of imagination. The American has "courage without imagination," a quality that Ricaud calls "a gift."
Ricaud's assessment, which most commentary has ignored, raises this story above the level of barracks-room bravado. The technique of judging a character by that character's response to a story or situation is used in vintage Hemingway. An analogy can be made to "The Killers," where the impact on Nick of Ole Andreson's situation is crucial to interpreting the theme of the story. "The Mercenaries" is also similar to both "The Killers" and The Sun Also Rises in that it anticipates the "don't think about it" motif. Ricaud's problem is that he thinks too much. He does not have the gift of a lack of imagination. Ricaud is not taken in by Graves's simple definition of bravery, nor can he accept Graves's dismissal of the danger they will be facing.
In the conversation prior to his telling of his meeting with Lupo, Graves's drunken posturing focuses on the forthcoming role that he and Ricaud will play as officers in the Royal Republican Peruvian Army in a conflict with Chile. The job pays well, $200 per month in gold, and Graves sees it as a "Peruvian doughnut." Griffin tells us that the expression was Schio slang for "duck soup." Smith also explains that it is slang for a simple task, "a piece of cake."
Hemingway used the expression in a letter to Howell Jenkins, written from Petoskey in December of 1919. In the letter Hemingway describes his forthcoming job as a hired companion for Ralph Connable, a job that would leave his days free, give him the run of the Connables' Toronto mansion, pay all his expenses plus $50 a month, as "This Toronto thing looks like the original Peruvian Doughnuts." Obviously then, the phrase suggests a cushy situation. However, much more is suggested in Graves's harping on the doughnut theme than his being a "propagandiste" to himself about how easy the next assignment will be.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hemingway's Neglected Short Fiction by Susan F. Beegel. Copyright © 1989 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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Table of Contents
ContentsEditor's Note
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Introduction
1 “The Mercenaries”: A Harbinger of Vintage Hemingway
2 Uncle Charles in Michigan
3 Ethical Narration in “My Old Man”
4 “Out of Season” and Hemingway's Neglected Discovery: Ordinary Actuality
5 Hemingway's Italian Waste Land: The Complex Unity of “Out of Season”
6 “A Very Short Story” as Therapy
7 The Bullfight Story and Critical Theory
8 From the Waste Land to the Garden with the Elliots
9 Hemingway's “On Writing”: A Portrait of the Artist as Nick Adams
10 The Writer on Vocation: Hemingway's “Banal Story”
11 Hemingway and Turgenev: The Torrents of Spring
12 “An Alpine Idyll”: The Sun-Struck Mountain Vision and the Necessary Valley Journey
13 Waiting for the End in Hemingway's “A Pursuit Race”
14 A Semiotic Inquiry into Hemingway's “A Simple Enquiry”
15 “Mais Je Reste Catholique”: Communion, Betrayal, and Aridity in “Wine of Wyoming”
16 “That's Not Very Polite”: Sexual Identity in Hemingway's “The Sea Change”
17 “A Natural History of the Dead” as Metafiction
18 “Homage to Switzerland”: Einstein's Train Stops at Hemingway's Station
19 Repetition as Design and Intention: Hemingway's “Homage to Switzerland”
20 Myth or Reality: “The Light of the World” as Initiation Story
21 Up and Down: Making Connections in “A Day's Wait”
22 Illusion and Reality: “The Capital of the World”
23 Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Stories, or the Spanish Civil War as Reality
24 The Hunting Story in The Garden of Eden
25 Hemingway's Tales of ”The Real Dark”
List of Contributors
Bibliography
Index