Hemingway’s Prestige: Crafting In Our Time

When Ernest Hemingway published his first short story collection, In Our Time, in 1925, it was markedly different from the romantic works that pervaded this era of writing from authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald and T.S. Eliot. Hemingway’s writing style is often described as curt, masculine, and unambiguous. However, it is his unique voice that defines his writing and evokes a sense of fragility in both his characters and their experiences. This quality is developed through the death of innocence endured by multiple characters in the book, but specifically through Nick Adams who, through shifting points of view and an unconventional narrative structure, becomes a parallel for the historical context of In Our Time, which represents a pivotal moment for the United States.

Generally, In Our Time features myriad instances in which Hemingway embraces the minimalistic nature of his writing style, but two particular moments in the collection illustrate not just his style, but also the effect his style can have on the reader. First, Chapter I begins with the narrator recalling, “Everybody was drunk” (13). Just as this vignette begins with notions of both celebration and inebriation, it quickly transitions towards an innocuous detail of life during the war when Hemingway writes, “‘You must put it out. It is dangerous. It will be observed.’ We were fifty kilometers from the front but the adjutant worried about the fire in my kitchen” (13). What is most noteworthy about this contrast between the jovial and sinister elements of war is in the way Hemingway presents them to the reader. Both are treated with the same amount of emotion and peculiar curiosity because they encapsulate the idea that war is not constant action. Rather, mundane moments like these permeate wartime experiences and neither drunken joyfulness nor precautionary orders from higher-ups are worthy of more than a blunt address.

Likewise, the story, “The Revolutionist” is a microcosm of Hemingway’s method of writing style, which is entirely void of ambiguity, but not of interpretation. He writes, “He was delighted with Italy. It was a beautiful country, he said. The people were all kind” (81). Each of these sentences provide the bare minimum of details to the reader as each follows the same general structure with little variation or color in the sentences and the way they flow together. Hemingway is preventing any sense of confusion in this collection, but it is worth noting that the three sentences selected from “The Revolutionist” are rife with meaning and allow for many potential understandings among the reader. For example, it contrasts with the attitude held by the narrator towards Budapest and other countries where kindness from people can shift one’s opinion on an entire country. However, these sentences could also be indicative of emotions felt toward a concept as trivial as kindness, which would be a challenge to unpack without context of the narrator’s experiences with cruelty. Instead of explaining the complex relationship of emotions with many details, Hemingway employs his writing style of surface details lacking any depth sans the ones ascribed to the situation by the reader. While the details Hemingway provides on the page through his writing are scarce, the depth beneath them is quite substantial.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the development undergone by Nick Adams throughout the stories Hemingway allots to him during In Our Time. He endures many experiences that lead to his ultimate death of innocence, the first of which is noted in “Indian Camp.” At a young age, Nick is the witness to the excruciating birth of a child and the subsequent suicide of that baby’s father, resulting in a confection of new impressions of the way other people live their lives in that the world is filled with pain and suffering, both in the short and the long term as evidenced by the extreme shift undergone by the Native American family. Likewise, Nick is exposed to several alternative angles on the role masculinity plays in his life. Nick is allowed a view into the attitudes expressed by the surrounding men towards childbirth, which is typically regarded as a seminal moment in the lives of those involved. Obviously, the father commits suicide, but also worth noting are the men who work together to deliver the baby as Hemingway writes, “Later when he [Nick’s father] started to operate Uncle George and the three Indian men held the woman still. She bit Uncle George on the arm and Uncle George said, ‘Damn squaw bitch!’ and the young Indian…laughed at him” (17). Segueing into post-birth medical “procedures,” the narrator details the first moments of the infant’s life by saying, “His father picked the baby up and slapped it to make it breathe and handed it to the old woman” (17). Each of these instances illustrates a different aspect of masculinity addressed by Hemingway. In the first passage, the men who are holding the woman down lack any sort of mindfulness regarding the fact that she is currently in labor as they brutally berate and tease her during a moment in which she is already enduring intense bouts of pain. Hemingway is showing that masculinity, in this instance, should be unwavering and impervious to change as a result of empathy or emotions. The men are oblivious to what the woman is feeling and are completely unwilling to do anything to make her feel better or make the process easier for her overall; instead, they make jokes and deliver insults with the goal of impressing the men around them.

In terms of the way Nick’s father acts in the second passage, Hemingway is showing masculinity as the way a man acts unflinchingly, but also as the man’s duty to himself and the people around him. Without a word of joy or any sort of congratulations for the woman, Nick’s father lifts, slaps, and delivers the child unceremoniously and a lack of feeling, just as the men who pinned her down during the birth. However, in this moment, the lack of emotion comes across as an expression of Nick’s father to do his job and move on with his life, giving no frills or flourishes along the way. While this is a suitable way to analyze the role masculinity plays throughout a formative day in the life of Nick Adams, it would not be nearly as impactful for the reader if not for the style of Hemingway’s writing throughout these scenes, especially in the latter. Hemingway does not use a male or female pronoun when referring to the newborn, instead he uses “it.” By doing this, he showcases that there is not one sliver of affection or pathos between Nick’s father and the brand new family. The baby was just another aspect of his job and he is wholly uninterested in developing a connection to him, or her, because that is not his role as a man. His work is done and now it is time for the mother to become attached to the baby. As for the mother, Hemingway uses the plain, blunt diction choice of “old” to describe her in the moment after delivering her baby. Most people are familiar with the etiquette of describing a woman who just gave birth in terms of her beauty, as if she is “glowing.” However, Hemingway says the mother is an old woman, which completely saps any remaining emotion from the moment. His style is ultimately reflective of the callous attitudes toward the experience Nick has just endured, developing more cynicism within himself because that is how his role models are acting. The questions he posed to his father are both asked and answered bluntly with only dialogue included and no accompanying sentences to detail the action; the reader is left to infer the effects of Nick’s transformation from what is left unsaid by Hemingway rather than what is written.

More than just the iconic writing style of Ernest Hemingway, though, the structure he utilizes in constructing In Our Time and the stories comprising it is also important when delving into the effects of masculinity and death of innocence on, in this case, Nick Adams. For example, the reactions of the characters in “Indian Camp” are to deal with the childbirth and the suicide properly and then move on as if nothing happened. But at the end of the story, the reader is given a lens into the psyche of Nick Adams and the way he is processing the potentially traumatizing events of the day in the aforementioned manner of blunt diction, syntax, and sentence structure delivered by Hemingway at a surface level, but with much more depth and feeling transpiring on the interior. After asking his father such questions as, “‘Do ladies always have such a hard time having babies?,’” “‘Do many men kill themselves, Daddy?,’” and “‘Is dying hard, Daddy?,’” the narrator depicts Nick’s actions by detailing, “Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning” (19). By asking these types of questions to his father, Nick is exposing a sense of his fragility, which the other men he spent the day with were terrified to reveal to those around them because they were inclined to maintain the veil of masculinity that shrouded them in an ability to cope with the tragedy they witnessed. As when Nick’s father attempts to shield his son from witnessing the suicide, but ultimately fails in this endeavor, a sensitivity is revealed. Nick’s father never considered the events of the day to be a learning event for his son, but rather they grew into that; he was sensitive to Nick’s inexperience and youth. Conversely, as Nick’s innocence slips away from him, he is comfortable with expressing his fragility towards the events of the day by pressing his father with the questions that pique his curiosity; Nick is simply trying to make sense of the scarring moments he witnessed. Both the style and structure of Hemingway’s writing reveal very little about Nick Adams, but just by the nature of the questions and the contrasting warmth Nick is suddenly aware of versus the chill of both the morning (and the recent events), one is able to infer that Nick has experienced a transformative event, even though Hemingway is minimalistic when writing about these particular emotions and their relation to Nick Adams, as a fictional construct.

The closest Hemingway comes in In Our Time to revealing Nick’s emotions plainly to the reader is during the conclusion of “The Three-Day Blow.” Rather than attempting to salvage his relationship with Marjorie (the emotionally vulnerable and romantic option), he chooses to spend the day relaxing and conversing with his friend, Bill (the facade of toughness and “masculine” option). It is important to note that Nick is fostering a range of cynical sentiments within him at the outset of this story because he is no longer a child, but rather he is grown and more conscious of his emotions and their effect. Statements like “‘That ought to cinch it for them’” (41) when referring to the Cardinals losing consecutive baseball names, show that Nick harbors cynicism and is more aware of the way the world operates, but as evidenced by the turn Hemingway makes in “The Three-Day Blow” is not what solely defines Nick Adams. When discussing what life would have been like between Nick and Marjorie, Bill says, “‘Now she can marry somebody of her own sort and settle down and be happy. You can’t mix oil and water’” (47). The subsequent narration continues, “Nick said nothing. The liquor had all died out of him and left him alone…He wasn’t drunk. It was all gone. All he knew was that he had once had Marjorie and that he had lost her. She was gone…That was all that mattered” (47). Up to this point, Nick was struggling with the conflict of relief that he did not have to suffer through married life and a crushing regret that he lost Marjorie, but at this moment, he shifts his attitude against Bill’s speech because the loss of Marjorie evoked fragility in him and not only is this his most vulnerable moment in In Our Time, but it is also the moment Hemingway comes closest to telling the reader outright that, yes, Nick Adams is fragile in this moment, not because of a momentary lapse in his tough demeanor, but because he is a fragile person at heart.

As a foil, Bill is much like the adult men in “Indian Camp.” He is set in his ways and immovable in terms of his principles as applied to Nick’s relationship with Marjorie. For a brief moment, Nick aligns himself with Bill and with the archetype he represents, as he opts to repress his emotions regarding Marjorie and instead engage in the masculine, male-bonding activities of the day. Furthermore, Hemingway frames the entirety of “The Three-Day Blow” as this conversation between two men, examining the mindset of Nick Adams only when silence washes over the two friends. And despite the fact that Nick chooses the masculine influence in his life over the feminine one, the mere fact that he acknowledges his regret at the end of the short story is indicative of his proclivity towards accepting his emotions rather than ignoring them.

The fragility experienced by Nick Adams is directly connected to its relationship with masculinity. For men like Nick, fragility is a feeling that could easily be suppressed and it is not welcomed by the people who run in his circles. However, Hemingway also establishes a juxtaposition of this feeling with fragility as it exists in female characters so as to show fragility, not only in how it exists alongside masculinity, but also in how it operates parallel to insecurity and, notably, the female protagonist of “Cat in the Rain” is a prominent example of insecure characters as they exist in the world Hemingway is building while moving further away from stories involving Nick Adams in the latter half of In Our Time. First, the woman in “Cat in the Rain” is not always referred to as such. Like the cat, the woman is never given a name for the duration of the story. Instead, Hemingway shifts the diction choices he uses to describe this character, referring to her first as a wife, then as a girl, and finally as “the Signora.” The cat, too, is named by its more childlike counterpart, a “kitty.” As the wife acts more childlike, fantastical, and subservient around her husband, so too does the narration treat her like that by reducing her reference point to the degrading name one would give a petulant child.

On the other hand, these are the qualities possessed by the wife in “Cat in the Rain” that lend themselves to her overall fragile nature, which is exasperated by the nature of the masculine foil residing in her husband. Similar to the bluntness with which Hemingway pens his short stories, the wife straightforwardly tells her husband what her desires are when she says, “‘And I want it to be spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes…I want a cat. I want a cat now. If I can’t have long hair or any fun, I can have a cat’” (94). The married couple in this story is on vacation, which is supposed to be a period of leisure, fun, and relaxation, but instead, the two are cooped up in their hotel room and the wife is beholden to whatever her husband wants to do, which is ultimately very boring for her. While the husband is stern and emotionless and perfectly content to continue doing what he has been doing, the wife is much more emotionally sensitive to a point of near instability, but this is simply a result of her husband’s stoic reaction to anything she does. By taking care of the cat, she would believe her feelings would be validated as she could develop more of a connection to the cat than her own husband. And while she may seem to be an emotionally unstable character, the way she is written by Ernest Hemingway (especially in her juxtaposition against the husband), allows for the reader to sympathize with her. The language used in the writing and the conversation had by the couple are both rather repetitive and circular, creating a sense of exasperation within the reader. One cannot help but side with the character who is seen by her husband to be fragile, but by the audience to be vulnerable and becoming more insecure by the second because of her husband, rather than for spite.

This fragility is depicted by Hemingway as the result of voicing one’s emotions and being rebuked, as opposed to the vulnerability felt by Nick Adams, who is self-aware enough to understand that any of his expressions would be rebuked so instead, he keeps his emotional fragility to himself, grappling with it throughout his experiences and in his own mind. And while the structure of In Our Time, as a whole, exemplifies this in that Nick is absent for a series of consecutive stories, including “Cat in the Rain” so as to develop the collection in a thematic sense rather than a narrative one, it also maintains his presence in the chapters of the book so as to prepare the reader for the post-war version of Adams. In so doing, the reader understands that the style of the writing feeds the development of the characters as they exist in a world of conflicting masculinity and fragility, but the structure is speaking to something larger. By revisiting Nick after stories featuring other unrelated characters conclude, Hemingway tackles the war culture in America at the time of his crafting the book in a manner unlike any other author’s attempt.

The instances in America’s history that most embellish preconceived notions of masculinity and masking any sort of sensitivity are almost always rooted in times of war. But whereas the Civil War was a particularly difficult time period that led into new eras of prosperity, World War I simultaneously exposed an uglier global unrest and led into a domestic decade of excess and gluttony followed by, of course, the Great Depression and World War II. It would be tough to argue that America salvaged much innocence from these catastrophic events, and a growing public awareness over time has only served to embrace cynicism even more. For now, though, it is important to understand the personal transition undergone by Nick Adams as a result of the universally debilitating war efforts. Nick has the strongest arc of any character in In Our Time and his story concludes with a meditation on the way his life and vulnerability were shaped by the events of life, including war, but not through an outward expression of these qualities, just as Hemingway wrote a series of short stories to present his own fragility as it exists against his masculinity in a veiled manner. As detailed in Chapter VI, the character of Nick Adams undergoes a small, but significant transformation on the battlefield. Hemingway writes, “Nick turned his head carefully and looked at Rinaldi. ‘Senta Rinaldi. Senta. You and me we’ve made a separate peace.’ Rinaldi lay still in the sun breathing with difficulty. ‘Not patriots’” (63). Similar to “The Three-Day Blow,” Nick is experiencing a male bond with Rinaldi, cementing the masculinity of his dalliance with war, but Rinaldi is presented to him under slightly different circumstances than Bill. With Bill, Nick made a conscious choice to bond with him, but in the case of Rinaldi, Nick made a one-sided attempt to connect with him because of circumstance. Any soldier could have been wounded next to Nick, but it only happened to be Rinaldi, an occurrence that is illustrative of the meaninglessness of war in the way that innocuous moments have an influential impact on the course of certain battles. In this way, the random and trivial nature of war (complete with the collapsed buildings and dead bodies) exacerbate the cynical attitude Nick maintains in response to the horrors he faces and later grapples with in “Big Two-Hearted River: Part II.”

The post-war Nick Adams is best exemplified in this story mainly because of the way Hemingway shows the reader (rather than directly informing) how Nick is different than the younger version of himself, as well as different from the people he grew up around who influenced his personal progression. As a whole, the story is suitable for this sentiment, but nowhere more than when the narrator describes, “He held the trout, never still, with his moist right hand, while he unhooked the barb from his mouth, then dropped him back into the stream…Nick did not like to fish with other men on the river. Unless they were part of your party, they spoiled it” (149). He treats the trout well, with an aura of responsibility, because he does not feel like he is at war with the fish. Instead, he respects the fish as a living creature, rather than doing the conventionally masculine thing and bludgeoning the fish so as to present himself as more of a man because he conquered the defenseless fish. After the war, Nick is so much more appreciative of life, but also simultaneously welcoming of the alone time he is given while fishing because the natural setting allows for himself to be truly vulnerable. He is at peace with losing a couple fish because he has nothing to prove; Nick is at peace with himself.

Expertly, Hemingway connects In Our Time to a larger artistic meaning and unique reading experience through stories exactly like those above. Chapter VI, for example, begins in media res, like most of these short vignettes Hemingway utilizes to break up the short stories comprising the book. The reader is launched into the story after Nick is already wounded as a mode for Hemingway to disorient his audience, which he also does by upending the conventional structure of a novel. Rather than crafting In Our Time as a cohesive narrative about Nick Adams, Hemingway intersperses stories that are only connected to this character through setting and thematic elements, leaving the reader to ponder about the artistic background of stories like “Cat in the Rain” and “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” rather than reaching the fairly obvious conclusion that Nick Adams is the human, characteristic manifestation of the United States. As Nick grows and changes and becomes a peaceful fisherman and a sensitive romantic and a loyalist to the fault, so to does the reader understand the depth of America’s growth, especially during the period Hemingway wrote In Our Time.

By the time “Big Two-Hearted River” arrives for the reader in the book, Nick Adams is already a well-developed character, but the two-part short story allows for a sense of seeing not only how Nick has changed throughout the loss of a lover and the viewing of a suicide and the insane hardships of war, but the way he applies what he has learned about his life, the world, and his life’s place in the world. The reader experiences this through a stereotypically masculine activity fishing so as to illustrate the way Nick Adams is different from those who shaped his personhood; he maintained his individuality throughout, blissfully at peace with his own sensitivity. After World War I, America (in the general sense), like Nick, was forced to confront what was truly perceived as valuable. Both chose the value of the individual. While the Roaring Twenties were categorized as an era of fame, excess, and selfishness, Nick openly rejected these concepts. Instead, he embodied individuality and being in touch with the inner self. He embraced sensitivity when the world around him grew more and more callous with every war. So, too, did America mature, only to take away the wrong concepts and betraying the identity that makes the country so wonderfully unique initially. It would be impossible to see America treating a fish so gently, as if it was a man who was severely wounded and resting next to a soldier in war. With Nick Adams, it makes perfect sense. Just as there is a stoic side to him, an element of his personality that is tied to his sense of duty and obligation, there is also a humanity and a shared sense of emotion in America.

But the stories themselves are at peace with their inherent fragility. Their shifting points of view and lack of a complete structural exposition (putting the expectation on the reader to accept vignettes that serve mostly as asides with most of the action having already taken place) illustrate the ultimate goal of Hemingway’s artistic achievement: to move the proverbial needle at least one degree closer towards readership embracing the novel as an outlet for an author’s most intimate feelings and a commentary on the state of the nation rather than merely a vessel with which to tell a story.

Image Source: Simon and Schuster