In EarnestHemingway’s Short Stories

During the last three decades, the popularity of Hemingway’s fiction has waned, especially with writers, readers, and women of my generation, whose feminist and post-feminist tastes lean away from what is perceived to be stories of violence, sport, and masculine authority. His women are weak and manipulative. He relies on exotic settings and situations to shoulder the drama of his stories. He is out-of-fashion these days because he was rumoured to be homophobic, anti-semitic, a bad drunk, a womaniser. Hemingway, it seems, only wrote of horse-racing, fishing, boxing, and skiing – and people have decided that it is better not to read him as the work seems so macho and dated.

In interviews, when I mention that one of my favourite short-story writers is Hemingway, invariably there is an awkward pause, and often a bemused reaction. Surely I would name someone more fashionable: Alice Munro, maybe, or Lorrie Moore. My reply is always that Hemingway’s best work is important because he crafted a style and tone that approximated his ongoing themes and subject matter. For that alone he is worth reading.

‘The dignity of movement of an iceberg,’ he once remarked, ‘is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.’ This simple statement aptly reflects Hemingway’s aesthetic and thematic concerns. He was one of the first short-story writers to pare back subjectivity and exposition to the extent that people had to read actively – indeed, they had to enter the narrative in order to fathom the seven-eighths of the story the author deliberately omitted. It is through his silences that Hemingway said the most, like a sulky, enigmatic child whose covert expressions reveal more than any number of clever words. ‘A writer may omit things that he knows,’ he said, ‘and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.’ This technique is often referred to as Hemingway’s famous ‘objective’ style, in which the point-of-view avoids analysis of a character’s thoughts and feelings and instead creates external actions, images and settings that suggest the inner life of characters without explanation or commentary. As American author Frederick Busch remarked on the ending to A Farewell to Arms: ‘He doesn’t have to tell me outright that Frederic Henry weeps for his Catherine; the way he excludes the tears makes me taste them.’ In this sense, the most minimal of Hemingway’s stories are probably closer to the genres of poetry and playwriting than to the ornate prose of the century into which he was born.

He did, however, find his antecedents in the nineteenth century, primarily in Anton Chekhov, whose voice, if you listen hard enough, can be heard below the surface of Hemingway’s prose. Chekhov was a master at using objective external details to convey complex emotional states, and employed understatement and irony to further the drama of the story. This rendering of the internal through the external, the subjective through the objective, is a technique that T.S. Eliot later described in terms of the ‘objective correlative’.

This is one of the primary reasons Chekhov was hailed as the father of the modern short story, but what most critics and readers of his prose forget was that Chekhov was an accomplished playwright, and I suspect his discovery of narrative distance in the short story was as much a consequence of his experience of writing for the theatre as his desire to explore new narrative forms. His first two collections, Tales of Melpomene (1884), and Motley Stories (1886) were considered light and somewhat frivolous works by literary critics. It wasn’t until 1887, when he published In the Twilight, that Chekhov attracted recognition as a virtuoso of the short-story form. It was also in 1887 that Chekhov’s first play, Ivanov, opened. Chekhov appears to have developed the objective, ‘dramatic’ point-of-view in his short stories concurrently with his first works for the theatre. ‘Subjectivity is a terrible thing,’ he once said. ‘It is bad in this alone that it reveals the author’s hands and feet…Best of all is it to avoid depicting the hero’s state of mind; you ought to try and make it clear from the hero’s actions.’ These are the words of a playwright rather than a prose writer, for the only tools the former has in order to convey meaning are dialogue, action, and setting – the three things both Chekhov and Hemingway concentrated on in order to suggest emotional and psychological undercurrents. Chekhov and Hemingway, I think, wanted readers to bring to the story what an actor would when performing a play script: engagement, interpretation, a layer of interiority in order to bring the work to life, a process during which the reader – like the thespian – becomes a collaborator in the making of meaning and experience.

It was Hemingway in particular who mastered, in prose form, the playwright’s technique of conveying exposition through minimal dialogue, of ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’. Many of his settings appear to be influenced by the obvious limitations of the theatre: one scene, one symbolic background, whether it be the café of ‘A Clean, Well-lighted Place’, the railway station of ‘Hills Like White Elephants’, or the single train compartment of ‘A Canary for One’. His most elliptical stories resemble one-act plays, comprised of dialogue, minimal action, and single settings that function as a thematic key. In ‘Hills Like White Elephants’, for example, a quarrelling couple sit on a railway station ‘between two lines of rails in the sun’. In fact, the station is a junction, a crossroads of sorts, and perfectly represents the emotional crossroads of the man and woman who, we sense, will never be ‘going in the same direction’ after the argument that spans the story. Hemingway inherited the distant, dramatic style from Chekhov and, to a lesser extent, from Joyce. As Charles May notes, ‘what at first seems merely a realistic depiction of ordinary physical reality communicates metaphorically what is, basically, incommunicable’.

Hemingway’s iceberg theory extends even further than his choice of point-of-view and style, further than the clipped dialogue and spareness of his prose. Often, that which is incommunicable or unknowable is the very subject of the story, as if the protagonist is standing on that small frozen island and gazing into the depths of the encompassing water at his own terrible darkness. This is why ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ is one of Hemingway’s best-known stories, and why he felt it to be one of his most successful. It is probably not much longer than seven-hundred words; it is a single scene, and in it very little ‘happens’. The ‘place’ of the title is a Spanish café, and by the end of the story, the cleanliness, the light, and the order of the café provide a safe and comforting protection against the unknown – the darkness and danger of night.

There are only three characters in the story, an ageing waiter, a much younger waiter, and an old man who drinks brandy long into the night, as he does every night. The tension is mainly between the waiters: the older one doesn’t mind keeping the café open; the younger one wants to close up and go home. The customer, however, won’t leave and continues to order brandy. It is the older waiter who intuitively understands his need to stay every evening and get drunk in the bar, his need for ‘a light in the night’.

The silent understanding that exists between the drinker and the ageing waiter is underscored by the opening dialogue, in which the young waiter comments on the fact that the brandy-drinker had tried to commit suicide the week before. When the older waiter asks why, the younger one says, ‘He was in despair’. When asked what caused the despair, the younger replies, ‘Nothing’. When asked, ‘How do you know it was nothing?’ the younger comments, ‘He has plenty of money.’ As the critic Carlos Baker points out, the force of the story is gathered through understatement, hints, the subtext of details and dialogue, and the transformation of ‘the young waiter’s mere nothing into the old waiter’s Something – a Something called Nothing which is so huge, terrible, overbearing, inevitable, and omnipresent that, once experienced, it can never be forgotten’. The antidote to this Nothing that is Something is the small cocoon – the safe fraction of iceberg that stands above the sea of darkness – the place that is a clean, well-lighted café.

Death (nada) is at the heart of many of Hemingway’s short stories, either literally or figuratively. I suspect this is why in recent times there has been a certain amount of confusion about Hemingway’s work, along with the misconception that he only writes about bull fights, hunting, boxing, and the permutations of masculine heroics – all of which result in the protagonist stoically facing a violent and tragic end. A measured reading of his stories doesn’t support this summary. Very few of them are, in fact, sports-related. Most appear modest and deceptively simple, relying on dialogue, patterns of detail and their underlying subtexts to create the drama rather than celebrate gratuitous violence. What many readers fail to recognise is that, even in the stories of violence, Hemingway uses sport as a narrative occasion to explore his literary obsession with the Nothing which is Something, just as he used the simple device of the waiters in the café of ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’.

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The three stories I shall concentrate on in this essay – ‘Hills Like White Elephants’, ‘A Canary for One’, and ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ are concerned with the complexities of male/female relationships. In these stories the nada concept is realised through breakdowns in partnerships – death comes in the form of separation, divorce, or simply a couple’s inability to communicate any more.

Following Chekhov’s dictum that the short story should begin in the middle of things, each opens in a drama that has begun long before we are admitted into it. There is an unspoken ‘it’ in all of them, a buried subject that the characters talk around but do not directly address. ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ begins with: ‘It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.’ Set in the wilds of Africa during a safari expedition, the mysterious ‘it’ is not directly explained until a quarter of the way through the story. The experience of reading the story up until that point is one that evokes a certain voyeuristic quality, as if the reader were eavesdropping on some vastly personal subject, and if he listens hard enough and picks up enough clues the private information will be revealed.

Hemingway begins similarly in ‘Hills Like White Elephants’. After the two characters have been established in the symbolic setting of the Spanish railway junction, the man, who is never named, remarks, ‘It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig…It’s not really an operation at all.’ In ‘Hills’, Hemingway pushes his elliptical style further and the characters never directly reveal what ‘it’ is. The conversation progresses: ‘It’s the only thing that has made us unhappy’; ‘If I do it you won’t ever worry?’; and, ‘…once they take it away, you never get it back’. A close reading of the story reveals, entirely through inference, that the man is trying to persuade the woman to have an abortion; she in turn does not exactly refuse or agree, her main desire is for the man to want what he does not, to find Something in Nothing. This idea is recapitulated in the title, which is lifted from a seemingly casual observation the girl makes, that the hills near the station look like white elephants. White elephants, of course, are either associated with totally useless possessions or a possession that is a liability because the expense of keeping it far outweighs its value. After the girl begs the man to drop the subject (‘Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?’), Hemingway can’t resist invoking the ‘nada’ concept in the last line of the story: ‘“I feel fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine”.’ Nothing is exactly resolved, but by the end of the story we know that, figuratively at least, these two won’t be travelling on the same train for very long.

In ‘Canary for One’ the Nothing that is Something is not revealed until the last line of the story. An American couple is travelling between Cannes and the Gare de Lyon in Paris, sharing a compartment with a partially deaf woman, also American, who carries with her a caged canary. Through seemingly insignificant dialogue the woman reveals that the canary is a gift to her daughter, a kind of consolation prize for the Swiss man the girl had wished to marry. The mother forbade the union because, as she maintains, ‘American men make the best husbands.’ The woman soon discovers that the couple themselves are American, and throughout the story she twitters away at them more frequently than the bird, particularly about the virtues of American husbands. The train compartment functions symbolically as a kind of cage confining the three characters, all of whom gaze out at the world through the window. The point-of-view of the story is a very distant third-person singular, from the American man’s perspective – though typically the fact that he is narrating is not revealed until almost halfway through the story when he remarks, ‘For several minutes I had not listened to the American lady, who was talking to my wife.’

The story begins with an image of domestic comfort: ‘The train passed very quickly a long, red stone house with a garden and four thick palm trees with tables under them in the shade.’ Soon, this image is undercut by another, more sinister sight of domesticity, which foreshadows the last line of the story: ‘As it was getting dark the train passed a farmhouse burning in a field. Motor-cars were stopped along the road and bedding and things from inside the farmhouse were spread in the field.’ A similar juxtaposition is created between the very fast train the three are travelling on – which the older woman is convinced will crash – and the image the man observes just before they arrive in Paris: ‘We were passing three cars that had been in a wreck. They were splintered open and the roof sagged in.’ At the end of the story, the older woman walks away down the platform with her canary, convinced the couple she is leaving is happy because they’re both Americans. The last line of the story, however, reveals that the couple’s Nothing (what the narrator has failed to tell us) is definitely Something: ‘We were returning to Paris to set up separate residences.’ The line functions as a dramatic punch line – deadpan, ironic. Most of the story, it seems, will happen after it has ended, as the events in the narrative impact on the future of the couple.

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Hemingway’s various techniques for communicating the incommunicable have a lot to offer writers at any stage of their careers. Not to read him because he’s too macho, too violent, or too sexist is to miss out on a consummate craftsman who honed his work into a precise marriage of style and subject matter. He was a writer who made silence sing, who found a way to disturb readers by what he didn’t write, and for that alone would-be authors should be intimate with his work.

Of course, I’m not always comfortable with his manipulative women, his emasculated men, his tragic heroes, but I admire and have been inspired by the way in which he wrote about them. Instead of placing a blueprint of feminist or Marxist theory on top of his work or, even worse, not reading him at all, I decided to have a dialogue with Hemingway’s stories in three of my own, inspired by ‘Hills Like White Elephants’, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’, and, to a lesser extent, ‘A Canary for One’. I wanted to speak Hemingway’s narrative language so that I might invert and play with the values it contained.

Employing his signature iceberg technique, in which seven-eighths of the story is known only to the writer, I wrote ‘Still Life’ as a way of conversing with ‘Hills Like White Elephants’. In an unnamed Sydney beachside café, a couple discuss a serious problem they share without ever directly naming it. Just as the hills and what they resemble in Hemingway’s story provide a metaphorical key to the subject – the unborn child – in ‘Still Life’, the objective correlative here is the beach across the road, usually a favourite beach for surfers, though on this particular day the sea is uncommonly flat and still.

My couple, too, is in transition, as they have been travelling by bus from northern New South Wales and have stopped off in Sydney for the afternoon before continuing on to Melbourne. Their relationship is also in transition, and seems to be going down (heading south) rather quickly. In my story, however, it is the woman who broaches the delicate, unnamed threat to their union, the nada that lurks between them. After ordering lunch, she remarks to her lover, ‘Maybe if you went to see someone…It’s pretty common, you know…More common than what you’d think.’ When she receives no response, she adds, ‘I could go with you…We could go together.’

The ‘it’, however, remains elusive, drawing more and more attention to itself because it is never named. The man tries to distract the woman from addressing the nada by remarking that ‘the surf might get up’ and later they could go for a swim. The woman replies, rather testily, that it has been predicted that the surf will not get up today and thus there is no point in swimming. The two talk around the subject and gradually, through inferences and verbal slips – ‘Maybe it’s psychological’; ‘It affects us both’ – it is revealed that the woman is trying to talk the man into seeking medical help for his impotence – a condition that is realised symbolically in the beach across the road that has no surf.

The inspiration for this story came not only from ‘Hills Like White Elephants’, but also from the American painter Edward Hopper. I was always drawn to his paintings for the same reason I loved the short stories of Hemingway – he composed figures centred in auras of mystery, and gazing at them afforded the viewer a certain voyeuristic experience. Hemingway makes you feel as if you’re eavesdropping all the time; Hopper’s gift is that he makes you feel as if you’re watching something you shouldn’t be. He positions the viewer as a Peeping Tom, and you find yourself gazing at the usually hidden tensions between men and women, without ever knowing the cause. Hopper’s images speak of an unnameable loneliness and isolation, and in paintings like ‘Hotel by a Railroad’, ‘Hotel Lobby’, and ‘New York Lobby’ the loneliness is not individual only, but an expression of disconnection between two lovers – articulated through their tense bodies and expressions, in the ways in which they always turn away from each other. In this sense, Hopper also communicates the incommunicable. Hopper’s preoccupation with the confined spaces of hotel rooms, lobbies, and cafés is a visual equivalent of the spacially-limited railway stations, bars, and trains that are the signature settings of Hemingway’s stories.

I’ve often felt that the painting that best reflected Hemingway’s aesthetic was Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’, which was also his most famous. In many ways it can be interpreted as a visual relative of ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ and ‘Hills Like White Elephants’. For this reason, when drafting ‘Still Life’, I decided to have a print of ‘Nighthawks’ hanging on the wall of the beachside café. Approximating Chekhov’s and Hemingway’s third-person distant narrative point-of-view, the narrator describes the famous painting:

a man and a woman were sitting up at the wooden counter of an American diner. The man looked like Humphrey Bogart and wore a suit and hat. He had a cigarette between his fingers. The woman, also smoking, was pretty and wore a red dress. They were both drinking coffee. It was night… There were two other figures in the painting. An attendant in white behind the curved wooden counter. His lips were parted, as though he were answering a question the Bogart look-alike had asked. The fourth figure sat at the other end of the counter with his back to the viewer. His suit was the same greyish-blue as the first man’s, the one who sat with the woman in the red dress.

The couple in the ‘Still Life’ story find themselves in a startingly similar situation: they are the only people in the café apart from the waiter and a man dining nearby. Since the couple are unable to address directly the cause of their own personal nada – the man’s impotence – they both use their individual interpretations of the painting as a way of talking about what they cannot say. Each makes predictions about the couple in the painting as a way of second-guessing the other’s intentions and beliefs:

‘They look serious… They’ve been having an affair. See the way she can’t look him in the eye?’​​​​​
   ‘She’s contemplating her cigarette. They’ve probably just had sex.’
   ‘Is that all you ever think about…The woman in the painting… she’s going to leave him. She just hasn’t found a way of telling him.’
   ‘Maybe if you didn’t drink so much – ’
   ‘Don’t you think…that he’s trying to talk that woman into something she really doesn’t want to do?’

The couple continue to argue about aesthetics as a way of articulating the unspeakable. The man maintains he loves the way Hopper ‘leaves just enough out to make it interesting’, how everything is ‘just below the surface’, while the woman, frustrated by what is left out, by what cannot be said, maintains that ‘even when he paints a couple, there’s always this huge distance between them, like so much hasn’t been said.’

The man distracts the woman by continuing to suggest that ‘the surf might get up’, despite radio reports predicting the opposite. The woman comments, ‘You know I don’t like swimming if there’s no surf’. In this story, like ‘Hills’, nothing is resolved on a literal level, but the reader hopefully senses in their silences that their union, like that of the couple in the painting, will never be the same again. ‘Still Life’ employs many of the objective techniques of ‘Hills Like White Elephants’, but slants the story toward an opposite, more ‘female’ point-of-view: it is the man who has changed physically, not the woman, and it is she who tries to persuade him to restore their former – but unattainable – harmony. ‘Still Life’ is not so much a feminist revision of ‘Hills’ as a second voice to it, a literary dialogue.

My thoughts about Hemingway and literary dialogues have had an influence on other short stories in Fifteen Kinds of Desire. ‘The Drover’s Wife’, for example, is a narrative improvisation on the other Drover versions – first authored by Henry Lawson in 1892, then reworked and parodied by Murray Bail in 1975, in a story which ‘dialogues’ in turn with the painting ‘The Drover’s Wife’, by Russell Drysdale. I’ve also reimagined several fairytales – all set in Sydney’s red-light district Kings Cross, which functions as a contemporary version of Grimms’ deep, dark woods. The story ‘Ash’ is a reworking of ‘Cinderella’, in which the protagonist is a seventeen-year-old boy, who is still a virgin. Ash is forced to work as a receptionist in his stepfather’s brothel after his mother dies. In ‘The Best’, which is a reworking of ‘Snow White’, the same boy is expelled from the brothel and his step-father’s home after he is discovered stealing from the till. In order to support himself he becomes a transvestite prostitute on William Street. His life is threatened by an older, more experienced transsexual hooker on the same block, who was considered the best and the prettiest, until seven English backpackers take pity on Ash and cart him back to their nearby hostel. In ‘Beau’, which is a rewriting of ‘Sleeping Beauty’, a mother of three boys is hit by a car and goes into a permanent coma. ‘Scarlet’ is a reworking of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, in which the protagonist is the eleven-year-old daughter of a heroin dealer who lives in Kings Cross. Scarlet has been taught how to mix heroin and inject it into her mother’s veins in the event that her mother is too strung out to do it herself. Instead of being a cautionary tale about a naive girl too young to protect herself, it becomes a parable that makes a virtue out of knowingness: the danger and corruption with which Scarlet has been raised proves to be her best defence during her walk through the ‘woods’ which are the threatening streets of the Cross.

My dialogues with the original stories and fairytales are inspired by the spirit of revisionism, although, unlike the revisionist fictions of Angela Carter or Margaret Atwood, my references to the original texts are unobtrusive; sometimes, I’ve been told, they’re not apparent on a first reading. The stories in Fifteen Kinds of Desire contain no direct quotations or replications, but invert and play with the subject matter of the ‘master narratives’. With these stories, I do not see myself as arguing with the original texts; rather, the conversation is between me and the ways in which women and men have been imagined. Much of what we communicate to one another remains underneath the storyline, there in the silences that Hemingway taught me not to fill.

Reference is made in this essay to the following works: Ernest Hemingway, The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (New York: Scribner, 1938), and Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner, 1932); Frederick Busch, A Dangerous Profession (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Anton Chekhov, Letter to Alex P. Chekhov, April 1883, in Louis S. Friedland, ed., Anton Chekhov: The Short Story, the Drama and Other Literary Topics (New York: Milton, Balch, 1924); Charles May, The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice (New York: Simon & Schuster MacMillan 1995); Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952); Mandy Sayer, Fifteen Kinds of Desire (Sydney: Random House, 2001).

In researching Hopper’s work in order to write this story, I should not have been surprised to find that Hopper was a huge fan of Hemingway, and wrote to him frequently.