Reading Hemingway's collection, In Our Time

Some of the best work a writer will ever do is a piece appreciating a work by another, an author who’s influenced him in the developmental years of his own writing. A writer will have thought years about an author’s work, and an understanding will develop over time. So I write about a work I find influential, In Our Time, the collection of short stories from early on in the career of Ernest Hemingway. I’ve spent years studying it, letting it sing to me.

You can’t blame Hemingway for recording what he finds he must do, how he must be, to be a man, in writing terms, in human terms, and by his own definition. That would contradict the long process of evolution, both within the species and all leading up to it. He lived and had to make his own choices, perhaps as much to survive as to live according to his basic desires. Perhaps it is his own taste in what manhood is about that leads him to be critical of other people, like Fitzgerald, for instance, a great writer in his own way, but not succeeding in Hemingway’s estimation of what it takes to be a man and handle your liquor. Hemingway's teasing Eliot, the guy who came up with 'infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing,' for needing employment as a bank clerk seems to be accusing someone else for one's own worst sins. Hemingway felt through different external pressures that the only manly way was for a writer to support himself through his own writing, that he must be 'good enough' for that to be that the case, as if such were the only proof of being good. But Hemingway lived in the knowledge that he couldn't have gotten started without his wife Hadley's family monetary support. And maybe part of him felt drawn to a kind of writing by which one did not care about the recognition and the income to show off, that the work had its own point, no matter how you did it, how often you did it, whether or not the publishers came knocking.

Each story from the collection highlights a certain facet of growing up from youth, to young adulthood, making the further and continual transitions that comprise being on one’s own. Part of the savor is that he is captured here en route, on the way, not totally there yet, each step an influence on him and what he will become, each experience new, interpreted by a mind wise enough to feel writing about it absolutely necessary. There’s also a sense of being relaxed in this adventure that sometimes happens more, as in certain situations, then it does elsewhere, more directly, more suddenly and with epiphany. Each story is a portrait of one of those meaningful moments, and each has its own pace to match the growing-up moments. The stories, not by coincidence, reflect the habit of observation the writing mind keeps, whether or not anything gets written or not. Growing up: it ain’t easy, but it’s worth writing about.

To me right now, it seems that growing up, or being a man, whatever you might want to call it, is a miracle of the DNA, of the DNA of life’s patterns, the DNA of evolution. The series of events is triggered by time, by outside events. Again, you can’t blame Hemingway for wanting to prolong, to carefully record, reveling somewhat, in this period of life. He had, I suppose, largely bloomed into maturity as these pieces were written, set with an obvious back-story of a writer finding his voice in his time. It makes the loss of the valise at the train station bearing stories of the same period all the more shocking and tragic. And yet, it would have been a growing experience as well, that also would have shaped the man and the sentences he wrote, not that we would have wished it.

Writing is often about transition, realization. Moving on from youth is a rich period of life, and even a great mystery that deserves homage in the religious, as we get Jesus Christ coming into his manhood, no one telling him what he should think, the Jesus of ‘render unto Caesar…’ A writer slows down the biology of the process to microscopic slide detail. And in the portrait, as if by coincidence, is a portrait of nature as well, a self-portrait worthy of naturalist study, as writers tend to be naturalists.

Hemingway was fond of cataloging, or matching himself with, other writers in boxing terms. How many rounds, whether not a knock-down, a knock-out, a victory or a draw. He would have appreciated being cataloged as a natural creature.

God will provide, the settler to a new land must believe, pray for, and hope. Growing up is new territory where one will have to live. The episodes from In Our Time are drawn out through an experience to a kind of end. And interestingly, where the collection begins with Nick as a boy trailing his hand in the water, as if to write as a way of figuring, we have Nick as the young man achieving the peace he anticipated in the act of thinking like writing in the end. In the middle there are good stories about handling distractions, dealing with intrusions on his fishing trips, and about finding fish. (Conversation is closed down into grunts, while the thinking remains clean and clear, more or less. Maybe such social reticence is another from of a beginning, encountering a real self beyond the illusions one has fallen into. The episodes bear the question, where and how will Nick fit in with society, if at all. His venture is somewhat like Huck Finn’s, existing alongside civilization, but on one’s own terms, knowing full well the craziness of trapping an actual human being in society.)

Hemingway, with typical humor, makes sense of the random discomfort of life, at least to his own mind. We have in his stories something akin to someone in the process of doing basically the right thing. Even if it’s becoming a writer. It was for him something to keep his faith in, something human.

An odd belief to think you could be a great writer. Armed with a vision, here's Hemingway, putting the time in. Interesting to see where it would lead him, that evolving vision that becomes almost Buddhist, almost beatific in The Old Man and the Sea, and A Moveable Feast. A career, interested in humanity. And basically, remember, his advice--call it what you will--for us was free, for the poor, freely given, as was appropriate, fitting and proper.