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Hemingway's Laboratory
The Paris in our time
By Milton A. Cohen The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2005 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8636-8
CHAPTER 1
Before in our time
Multiple Directions
When Hemingway and his wife embarked for Paris in December 1921, his literary career was very much up in the air. His publications thus far were virtually nil, and he was uncertain about his intentions. But if he did not know what sort of writer he would become, he knew that he was putting behind him the literary identity he had striven for over the past three and a half years: he packed few of his stories and poems.
Those years had witnessed false starts, multiple directions, wasted effort. Their lodestar was his determination to be a successful writer. Besides his high school juvenilia, he wrote stories and poems continuously after he was wounded in July 1918: in Milan while recuperating; at home in Oak Park, Illinois, and at the family cottage on Walloon Lake, Michigan, in 1919 and summer 1920; and when he lived on his own in Petoskey, Michigan (fall 1919), in Toronto (winter-spring 1920), and finally in Chicago (fall 1920 to fall 1921). Concurrently, since leaving high school in 1917, he had worked on and off as a journalist, writing straight news stories as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star, short articles for the Co-operative Commonwealth magazine in Chicago, and human interest features as a freelancer for the Toronto Star.
This divided identity—journalist, poet, fiction writer—partly explains Hemingway's uncertain direction in 1921, but the kind of fiction and poetry he should pursue—popular? modernist? satirical?—was also in flux. Failure as a popular writer and exposure to modernist literature in Chicago had already begun to change his thinking. It would change further in Paris, under the tutelage of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound and the influence of several other modernists. But the ambivalence in his literary identity did not resolve itself immediately. During his first year in Paris, he wrote more poems but finished only two stories, "Up in Michigan" (begun in Chicago) and "My Old Man." His primary occupation was still journalism. This chapter will briefly trace these various stages in Hemingway's development and look closely at the formative influences of Anderson, Stein, Pound, Eliot, and journalism on his early experimental writing in Europe. His first serious story, "Up in Michigan," is a touchstone for gauging these influences.
Stories for the Saturday Evening Post: Oak Park and Petoskey, 1919–20
The modernist who composed in our time in 1923 is scarcely recognizable in the Hemingway of four years earlier, who expected to storm the popular market for short stories. So different are the two, in fact, that his creative writing in Europe amounts to almost a clean break. For this reason, his writing for the popular market needs only brief summary, except for one potential link to the chapters of in our time.
The Hemingway who returned to America with his war wounds and Italian cape in 1919 had no intention of becoming an innovative "artist"—his eye was fixed on the popular market of the Saturday Evening Post and Red Book. He brought home stories he had written while recovering from his wounds in Milan, and he wrote new ones at home in Oak Park. When his family returned home from their cottage on Walloon Lake, Michigan, Hemingway stayed on, then rented a room in nearby Petoskey in fall 1919 to continue writing. When he moved to Chicago a year later, he was still writing stories. In them, as Michael Reynolds observes, Hemingway "was imitating what he took to be marketplace fiction ... his eye from the beginning was fixed on the bottom line: would the piece sell?" Reynolds continues:
[T]hese juvenilia read like O. Henry and Ring Lardner, if those two had combined to write for St. Nicholas magazine. The heroes are all young, audacious, and successful. Punk Alford, a crime-solving newspaper reporter; Rinaldi Rinaldo, an Italian-American war vet; Jack Marvin, a much decorated pilot; Nick Grainger, a wounded soldier in Milan. The settings are either Italy or Chicago.... the plots are serious, romantic, sometimes humorous, and frequently revolve around either winning a girl's heart or a father's approval. Jack Marvin, son of an ex-champion boxer, must prove to his father that he is not yellow. Stuy, a rich boy, must become middle-weight champion to win his girl's hand. ("Looking Backward" 2–3)
The style that has become so thoroughly associated with Hemingway—rhythms of sparsely modified simple and compound sentences—is nowhere to be found in these stories. Instead, ornate complex sentences, often narrated in a facetious tone, proliferate. For example: "I came out of the wind scoured nakedness of Wabash Avenue in January into the cosy bar of the Cambrinus and, armed with a smile from Cambrinus himself, passed through the dining room where the waiters were clearing away the debris of the table d'hotes and sweeping out into the little back room" ("The Mercenaries" 105). Like many novice writers, Hemingway expected the Saturday Evening Post to gobble up these stories. When it did not, he kept on cranking them out while finding various ways to support himself.
Over the fall and winter of 1919, however, he did try out one form that Reynolds calls "the seed bed for the interchapters of in our time and the subject matter for many of the Nick Adams stories in In Our Time" ("Looking Backward" 4). These were brief sketches, most just a few paragraphs long, each about a single character living in a small town. Each sketch is titled with that character's name and presents his or her personality or situation in narrative that mostly summarizes, dramatizing only a key speech or moment. As Reynolds notes, Hemingway's immediate source for these eight "Cross Roads" sketches was E. W. Howe's "The Anthology of Another Town," which the Saturday Evening Post began to serialize in fall 1919. A more prominent source for both Howe and Hemingway was Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology (1916), whose small-town characters recall from the grave their disappointments and dreary lives.
Although the brevity of the "Cross Roads" sketches anticipates the compressed chapters of in our time, the latter are not simply "polished extensions of 'Cross Roads'" ("Looking Backward" 6). The narrative style of the two works is almost antithetical: the "Cross Roads" sketches are told stories, heavily narrated. "Pauline Snow," for example, concludes after the protagonist's walk into the countryside with Art Simons:
After a while some of the neighbors made a complaint, and they sent Pauline away to the correction school down at Coldwater. Art was away for awhile [sic], and then came back and married one of the Jenkins girls. (Along With Youth 124)
By contrast, nearly all of the in our time chapters present scenes that start in the middle, often lack an ending, and depend on description and dramatization rather than narrative summary. Nonetheless, Hemingway was to recycle several of the "Cross Roads" characters and situations into his mature stories. "Pauline Snow," for example, is the model for the brutal seduction story "Up in Michigan," which begins with the same summarized character history:
Jim Gilmore came to Hortons Bay from Canada. He bought the blacksmith shop from old man Horton. Jim was short and dark with big mustaches and big hands. He was a good horseshoer and did not look much like a blacksmith, even with his leather apron on. He lived upstairs above the blacksmith shop and took his meals at D.J. Smith's. ("Up in Michigan" 59)
Pauline Snow was the only beautiful girl we ever had out at the Bay. She was like an Easter Lily coming up straight and lithe and beautiful out of a dung heap. When her father and mother died she came to live with the Blodgetts. Then Art Simons started coming around to the Blodgetts' in the evening. (Along with Youth 124)
Although Hemingway's friend Bill Home encouraged him to keep at these sketches, he quit them after a few months, having finished eight. Reynolds feels that "the young writer did not fully realize the possibilities of what he had written" ("Looking Backward" 6). But arguably, Hemingway did recognize that these sketches were just as derivative as the stories he was trying to publish and that their setting and theme—the constricted life in rural and small-town America—was not one he found congenial. Moreover, he was about to encounter a writer in Chicago who was hard to top in this genre: Sherwood Anderson.
Hemingway, Anderson, and the Chicago Renaissance: Chicago, 1920–21
The avant-garde of Paris was not the first that Hemingway encountered, for Chicago, too, had experienced a creative surge and a lively intermingling of artists, writers, publishers, and journalists. In 1920, when Hemingway moved there, the Chicago Renaissance was well past its prewar prime, however, and several of its leading figures, such as Margaret Anderson and her Little Review, had moved on to the more active hubs of the avant-garde in New York and Paris. Nonetheless, the Chicago literary community could still boast Harriet Monroe's pioneering Poetry magazine and perhaps the most controversial of new novelists, Sherwood Anderson, who had just published Winesburg, Ohio the year before. More important, at Y. K. Smith's large apartment, Hemingway lived and associated with young writers keenly interested in literature as an art and modernism in all the arts, eager to discuss the most recent psychosexual theories of Freud, Kraft-Ebbing, and Havelock Ellis, and well-connected to Anderson and other Chicago luminaries. Still intent on achieving practical success as a writer, Hemingway was skeptical of much of the "art-for-art's-sake" talk, but he was nonetheless eager to read the writers whose names were so frequently discussed—Anderson, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Floyd Dell, Knut Hamsun, and the Russian novelists, particularly Turgeniev. They all had something to teach him about craft, particularly the successful yet innovative Anderson, who visited the apartment often and took a liking to Hemingway (Fenton 88–90; Reynolds, "Biography of a Book" 36–37).
In Anderson, as in Mark Twain, Hemingway saw how colloquial American English could become a powerful narrative device, particularly in the first-person voices of young narrators, whose colorful expressions, broken sentences, and stammering repetitions betray a naive, unprotected sensibility. Anderson's Winesburg, moreover, like Joyce's Dubliners and Turgeniev's A Sportsman's Sketches, gave the short story new respectability, and Anderson's collection showed how the experiences of a central character—a young man—could link the stories thematically. In many of the Winesburg stories and others, such as "I'm a Fool" and "I Want to Know Why," the protagonists do not fully understand the meaning of their experience, creating dramatic irony, and often this meaning is sexual. Repeatedly, sex appears as a disruptive and disturbing force that protagonists can neither repress nor fully understand.
Hemingway was to adapt and transform several of these qualities in his first artistically serious short story, "Up in Michigan," which he began in Chicago in 1921 and revised in Paris. Defying the conventional wisdom that an author should not make the point-of-view character a member of the opposite sex, Hemingway makes his protagonist a naive servant girl who does not understand how her infatuation with the town's blacksmith, Jim Gilmore, is increasingly tinged with sexual desire. In a paragraph that lists the various physical qualities she liked about Jim, the last is sexually suggestive:
One day she found that she liked it the way the hair was black on his arms and how white they were above the tanned line when he washed up in the wash basin outside the house. Liking that made her feel funny. (Complete Short Stories 59)
Her viewing this surrogate of private parts recalls the voyeurism in Anderson's "The Strength of God" and the insistent, homoerotic energy of Wing Biddlebaum's hands. Like Anderson's protagonists, Liz does not understand why she "found herself liking" this glimpse. And the narrative expresses her puzzlement ("made her feel funny") in her own unsophisticated, ambiguous colloquialism—a technique Hemingway would use again near the end of chapter 1 of in our time: "It was funny going along that road." If "Up in Michigan" surpasses Anderson (and virtually every other living writer) in its sexual explicitness, and in its blatantly sexual images of "hard" and "tight" anticipating the actual encounter, it borrows outright an image of sexual desire—"shining eyes"—that Anderson made central to "I Want to Know Why." And like so many of Anderson's protagonists, Liz Coates feels thoroughly disillusioned and abandoned following an encounter that Jim has brutalized into near rape. In attempting to out-Anderson Anderson, however, Hemingway falters with point of view, shifting it to Jim at times ("Jim began to feel great"), and drops into the rhetoric of a boy's locker-room to describe Liz's growing desire: "She was frightened but she wanted it. She had to have it."
The naive protagonist also appears in "My Old Man," a 1922 story which, more than any other, helped launch Hemingway's career but also haunted him for years to come with its obvious debts to Anderson. The racetrack setting, the young narrator who does not fully understand the corruption around him but nonetheless grows disillusioned by the end, his narrative voice—full of gee's and "I was nuts about the horses" and "[It] was the swellest course"—all of these elements are Andersonian trademarks. Less obvious was what made the story Hemingway's: the mastery of a particular subculture—here, the world of European thoroughbred racing—down to its fine details—for example, the differences between the Italian and French tracks, and a story that is far more carefully and fully plotted than one typically finds in Anderson.
Three years later, Hemingway acknowledged to Scott Fitzgerald that this fictional mastery of a subculture—applying, as well, to his stories about boxing and bullfighting—was "not the kind of thing I'm shooting for" (Selected Letters 180). He might have added that the story's heavily narrated plot (young Joe mostly tells it) also proved uncongenial to an aesthetic that increasingly stressed imagistic presentation. But "telling" was very much Anderson's style, and Anderson's fingerprints were what the early critics fixed on, to Hemingway's increasing irritation. Edmund Wilson, for example, immediately noted the similarity in a letter acknowledging receipt of Three Stories & Ten Poems. Hemingway's reply exudes the "anxiety of influence":
No, I don't think "My Old Man" derives from Anderson. It is about a boy and his father and race horses. Sherwood has written about boys and horses. But very differently. It derives from boys and horses. Anderson derives from boys and horses. I don't think they're anything alike. I know I wasn't inspired by him. (25 Nov. 1923, Selected Letters 105)
What unquestionably did inspire Hemingway in 1920–21 was Anderson's kindness, professional encouragement, and generosity, which, like Y. K. Smith's literary circle in Chicago, had much to do with changing the younger writer's literary aims. Anderson recognized and encouraged Hemingway's talent—"He's going to go someplace" he predicted after their first meeting (qtd. in Fenton 89). He urged the writer and his bride to join the migration of artists and writers to Paris, where he could develop his craft in a milieu friendly to artists and American dollars. Most important, he opened crucially important doors to Hemingway in Paris with letters of introduction to Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Lewis Galantière, and Sylvia Beach. The Hemingway who left for Paris in December 1921 may well have had "no clear conception of what he wanted to do," as Y. K. Smith described him in Chicago (Fenton 86). But he at least knew that he would not be an author of slick fiction. Just what identity he would pursue instead—professional journalist, modernist poet, satirist, avant-garde writer—remained to be determined.
Hemingway and Stein: Paris, 1922–23
Hemingway's relationship with Gertrude Stein has been recounted many times but never with enough attention to Stein's theories and styles to show how profoundly they influenced Hemingway's prose experiments and emerging style in 1923. Of course, her influence went beyond aesthetics, style, and technique to help shape the young writer's professional identity. It was Stein who told him, after looking over the stories and unfinished novel he had brought with him from Chicago, "begin again and concentrate." He did. It was Stein who told him he would have to cut the journalistic umbilical cord if he hoped to be reborn as a serious writer. He did. Her influence in these formative years can scarcely be overestimated and was matched only by Pound's.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hemingway's Laboratory by Milton A. Cohen. Copyright © 2005 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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