all the Hemingway stories in my textbooks and anthologies. The young narrator of “In Another Country” has been shot in the leg, and among his crowd of patients he’s the lucky one. Manolo in “The Undefeated” goes straight from a hospital bed into the bull ring and is almost immediately gored again. “The Battler” opens with Nick nursing a black eye, just before he meets a punch-drunk boxer with one ear gone and the other worn to a nub, and in “Cross-Country Snow” he can’t telemark because of a wound to his leg. The narrator of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is dying of gangrene. All these wounds and scars . . . I’d never linked them up before, but when I did they began to seem the most visible symptoms of a general condition that included the Swede’s despair, Francis Macomber’s humiliation, Krebs’s inability to feel.
There’s a moment at the end of “Indian Camp” when Nick’s father is rowing them home after delivering a baby by cesarean. It’s been a rough morning. In the course of the birthing the baby’s father, unable to leave the hut because of a crippling axe wound, was driven to such distress by his woman’s cries that he slashed his own throat. Nick avoided watching the operation, but had a good look at the dead man’s neck when his father examined the cut. He’s young—still calls his father Daddy. Now they’re crossing the lake toward home, Nick trailing his hand in the water. And what is he feeling?
In the early morning sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
I first read the end of this story with something like nostalgia. What child hasn’t dreamily trailed a hand in the water, lulled by the creak of oars in stronger hands, the rhythmic lunge of the boat? This memory, more the body’s than the mind’s, brought with it a recollection of the old serene trust that the world was kindly and mine for good. I recalled having this trust, and so recognized what Nick was feeling, but I no longer felt it myself.
It had a sting in its tail, this quiet passage. Even as I smiled at young Nick’s doomed assurance—doomed the instant he insisted on it—I understood that mine was already gone, and with it the trick of not seeing my own fate in that of others. At this moment I knew what I knew: that what happened to everyone else would happen to me.
You can’t read “Indian Camp” and then go back to
The Fountainhead.
Everything seems bloated and cheesy—the swollen sentences, the hysterical partisanship of the author, the crassly symbolic, uninflected characters, the impossible things they think and say and do. Really, you can’t believe a word of it. “Indian Camp” ruined
The Fountainhead
for me, even as the novel helped me to see the patience and delicacy and adamant reality of the story.
I already admired Hemingway above all other writers, but the truth was that I’d been drawn to him mostly by his life—that is, by the legend of his life—and by a set of ideas about his work that spilled over from the legend. I’d gone in looking for images of toughness, self-sufficiency, freedom from the hobbles of family and class and conventional work, so that’s what I’d found. Now I was reading a different writer. Hard things happened in these stories, but the people weren’t hard. They felt the blows. Some of them gave up and some came back for more, but coming back wasn’t easy. The first time I read “Big Two-Hearted River” I liked it for its physical details. You saw everything Nick did, in precise, almost fussy descriptions that most writers would’ve left out. How he drives the pegs of his tent until the rope loops are buried, and holds his pants and shoes in his hand when leaving the tent at sunup. How he dampens his fishing leaders. Exactly how much flour and water he uses to make his pancakes—a cup of each. I’d liked being in on all these rough solemnities but I had missed the fact that Nick
There’s a moment at the end of “Indian Camp” when Nick’s father is rowing them home after delivering a baby by cesarean. It’s been a rough morning. In the course of the birthing the baby’s father, unable to leave the hut because of a crippling axe wound, was driven to such distress by his woman’s cries that he slashed his own throat. Nick avoided watching the operation, but had a good look at the dead man’s neck when his father examined the cut. He’s young—still calls his father Daddy. Now they’re crossing the lake toward home, Nick trailing his hand in the water. And what is he feeling?
In the early morning sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
I first read the end of this story with something like nostalgia. What child hasn’t dreamily trailed a hand in the water, lulled by the creak of oars in stronger hands, the rhythmic lunge of the boat? This memory, more the body’s than the mind’s, brought with it a recollection of the old serene trust that the world was kindly and mine for good. I recalled having this trust, and so recognized what Nick was feeling, but I no longer felt it myself.
It had a sting in its tail, this quiet passage. Even as I smiled at young Nick’s doomed assurance—doomed the instant he insisted on it—I understood that mine was already gone, and with it the trick of not seeing my own fate in that of others. At this moment I knew what I knew: that what happened to everyone else would happen to me.
You can’t read “Indian Camp” and then go back to
The Fountainhead.
Everything seems bloated and cheesy—the swollen sentences, the hysterical partisanship of the author, the crassly symbolic, uninflected characters, the impossible things they think and say and do. Really, you can’t believe a word of it. “Indian Camp” ruined
The Fountainhead
for me, even as the novel helped me to see the patience and delicacy and adamant reality of the story.
I already admired Hemingway above all other writers, but the truth was that I’d been drawn to him mostly by his life—that is, by the legend of his life—and by a set of ideas about his work that spilled over from the legend. I’d gone in looking for images of toughness, self-sufficiency, freedom from the hobbles of family and class and conventional work, so that’s what I’d found. Now I was reading a different writer. Hard things happened in these stories, but the people weren’t hard. They felt the blows. Some of them gave up and some came back for more, but coming back wasn’t easy. The first time I read “Big Two-Hearted River” I liked it for its physical details. You saw everything Nick did, in precise, almost fussy descriptions that most writers would’ve left out. How he drives the pegs of his tent until the rope loops are buried, and holds his pants and shoes in his hand when leaving the tent at sunup. How he dampens his fishing leaders. Exactly how much flour and water he uses to make his pancakes—a cup of each. I’d liked being in on all these rough solemnities but I had missed the fact that Nick
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