Hemingway: The Posthumous Achievement

HEMINGWAY

by William Abrahams

THE NICK ADAMS STORIES
by Ernest Hemingway
Scribner’s, $7.95

Of course, the most important aspect of the posthumous life of a writer is that his work should live: that it should survive and endure, as Hemingway’s at its best has done and will continue to do. But this, though it is the most important, is only one aspect of living posthumously.

There is also the life of the legend that thrives after a writer’s death, especially if he has already been “a legend in his own lifetime” like Hemingway, a more glamorous figure than merely a writer. Posthumously, the legend is kept alive by a flow of gossip and the production of memoirs (whether adulatory or derogatory hardly matters) from friends, relatives, rivals, and hangers-on, until in time the legend comes to loom as large as, if not larger than, the work itself. (It is my own conviction that the single most powerful factor operating against a true appreciation of Hemingway the artist is the quasimythic, all too public and publicized figure of “Papa Hemingway,” selfcreated by Dr. Hemingstein and brought to its apogee, or nadir, by A. E. Hotchner.)

Finally there are the posthumous publications, the most immediate evidence of a continuing life—those gatherings of previously published but uncollected work (in Hemingway’s ease his journalism and his stories of the Spanish Civil War) or manuscripts the writer left behind, finished and awaiting publication, or in a fragmentary state, or finished and put aside with dissatisfaction. So it is that now, some ten years after his death, we have yet another “new” book with the name Ernest Hemingway on the title page, which brings together some of his classic achievements in the short story, along with a story (one of his earliest) and parts of stories and episodic fragments of a novel—all being published for the first time. Even if one has faults to find with the enterprise, as I do, for anyone who is an admirer of Hemingway, as I am, it must count as an event, though a considerably lesser one than either A Moveable Feast or Islands in the Stream.

A Moveable Feast, his memoir of Paris in the 1920s, and an important addition to the Hemingway canon, was the first of the posthumous publications (1964). It posed no editorial problems or uncertainties for the reader. This was a manuscript that the author had completed and prepared for publication, even including a preface, and Mrs. Hemingway supplied an admirable, brief, informative Note that told all one needed to know about the composition of the book. It might have served her as a model for any further posthumous works over which she has presided: “Ernest started writing this book in Cuba in the autumn of 1957, worked on it in Ketchum, Idaho, in the winter of 1958-59, took it with him to Spain when we went there in April, 1959, and brought it back with him to Cuba and then to Ketchum late that fall. He finished the book in the spring of 1960 in Cuba, after having put it aside to write another book, The Dangerous Summer, about the violent rivalry between Antonio Ordonez and Luis Miguel Dominguin in the bull rings of Spain in 1959. He made some revisions of this book in the fall in 1960 in Ketchum. It concerns the years 1921 to 1926 in Paris.” For Islands in the Stream, the novel published in 1970, Mrs. Hemingway’s Note was a good deal less satisfactory: “Charles Scribner. Jr., and I worked together preparing this book for publication from Ernest’s original manuscript. Beyond the routine chores of correcting spelling and punctuation, we made some cuts in the manuscript, I feeling that Ernest would surely have made them himself. The book is all Ernest’s. We have added nothing to it.” But even if one grants that Mrs. Hemingway’s and her husband’s critical judgment precisely coincided, it would have been illuminating to know what the “cuts in the manuscript” were and where they occurred. In one sense, then, the book is truly “all Ernest’s”; in another, it is not. (Ultimately, I suppose, we may expect an annotated, complete Islands in the Stream, much as we have had the final version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, then the first version, and now, coming out this summer, the second version.)

For The Nick Adams Stories Mrs. Hemingway offers no Note at all; instead there is a modest preface by Philip Young, helpful in its biographical details, but unpersuasive in its argument. The book is a collection of all the stories in which the character Nick Adams (conventionally, but too simply taken as the author’s alter ego) plays a role, however slight. (Indeed, in at least one of the stories, told in the first person, he is not even named, so that it might well be someone else’s history.) The stories are arranged chronologically, not as they were written, but as the events they describe occur. To Mr. Young these “events of Nick’s life make up a meaningful narrative in which a memorable character grows from child to adolescent to soldier, veteran, writer, and parent—a sequence closely paralleling the events of Hemingway’s own life.” In short, some of the most masterly short stories written by an American in this century are made to serve as chapters in a shadow fictional autobiography or autobiographical novel, just as the same material was made the basis for a dreadful movie of the early 1960s called Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man,

There is, I feel, a serious misconception at work here: to believe that a short story and a chapter in a novel are essentially the same, that a succession of stories about a character make him more “meaningful,” more “memorable,”more “understandable.” But a novel is not a story: the method of the novelist is very different from that of the short-story writer. A story, to the degree that it succeeds as a work of art, contains within itself all that we need to know aesthetically, though I will grant that this may not be the case if one chooses to read it as a document in the author’s biography.

Mr. Young asks us to consider “the trouble with ‘Big Two-Hearted River.’ Placed where it was—at the end of In Our Time, the first collection—it puzzled a good many readers. Placed where it goes chronologically, following the stories of World War I, its submerged tensions—the impression that Nick is exorcising some nameless anxiety—become perfectly understandable.” But surely, it is the sense of some “nameless anxiety” that haunts the story and gives it its extraordinary depth and poetry. Literalism may be crucial to the journalist; it can suffocate the artist; and Hemingway, perhaps it needs to be said again, was one of the most conscious of artists. He knew what he was about in writing his stones; he was a master of omission and suggestion, of cadence and epithet. The secret of his art, or one of its secrets, is its appearance of giving more in fact than it does. And indeed, one wants no more from the self-contained story: we leave it with a sense of its absolute rightness. Would we alter by so much as a centimeter our admiration for Joyce’s “The Dead,” for example, if it were preceded by a succession of episodes from the early life of Gabriel Conway?

As I have suggested, the assumptions upon which this collection is based strike me as altogether wrongheaded. But this is not to deny the pleasure one is afforded by reacquainting oneself with one marvel after another. That matchless opening of “In Another Country”:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

I have no idea how many more posthumous Hemingway books we can look forward to. (The new stories in the present collection, set in italics to distinguish them from the ones already published, are recognizably lesser or apprentice work. It is quite obvious that the author knew this himself and put them aside, which is not to say that it was ill advised to bring them to light.) One volume that is sorely needed, and that would testify perfectly to the enduring life of Hemingway’s art, is a complete Collected Stories, carefully edited, that would bring together all the published stories, arranged chronologically as written, and in a separate group, perhaps as an appendix, the stories that he chose not to publish in his lifetime. No doubt the arguments concerning Hemingway’s “place" will continue for years to come; but the existence of such a volume as I have proposed would reaffirm, whatever the dispute over degree, a true master.