Making It New: 1900–1945 411husband in the bunk above, listening to the woman in her agony, and cutting his
throat. “Why did he kill himself, Daddy?” Nick asks. “I don’t know, Nick,” comes the
reply. “He couldn’t stand things, I guess.” Although this is the only significant,
foreground suicide in Hemingway’s fiction, the terms have been set. “Things” will
remain to the last hurtful and horrible, to be stood with as much dignity and courage
as possible. For the moment, though, these things of horror are too much for Nick
to dwell on. He must bury them far down in his mind and rest secure in the shelter
of the father. “In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with
his father rowing,” the story concludes, “he felt quite sure that he would never die.”
Such are the good times of boyhood in Hemingway: not mother and home but
out in the open with father, recreating a frontier idyll. So, in the second story in In
Our Time, to escape his wife’s nervous chatter, Nick’s father goes out for a walk.
“I want to go with you,” Nick declares; “all right,” his father responds, “come on,
then.” Soon, when Nick is older, in the later stories “The End of Something” and
“The Three-Day Blow,” father will be replaced as companion by his friend Bill. But
only the counters have altered, not the game. As the title of his second collection of
stories, Men Without Women (1927), plainly indicates, the best times of all, because
the least complicated, least hurtful, and most inwardly peaceful, are had by men or
boys together, preferably in some wide space of land or sea, away from the noise,
pace, and excitement of cities: Jake Barnes, the hero of The Sun Also Rises (1926)
fishing with his companions Bill Gorton and Harris; Thomas Hudson and his
three sons in Islands in the Stream (1970); and from In Our Time, in “Cross-Country
Snow,” Nick and his friend George skiing in Switzerland one last time before Nick
commits himself to the trap of marriage and fatherhood. “Once a man’s married,
he’s absolutely bitched,” is Bill’s drunken wisdom in “The Three-Day Blow”: bitched
by responsibilities, by domesticity, but above all by the pain locked in with a love
that, one way or another, may easily be broken or lost. And a man’s world, although
safer from certain kinds of anxiety or threat, is for Hemingway only relatively so.
A man will lose his wife but he will also lose his father, not just in death but in
disillusionment. Near the end of In Our Time, an exemplary father dies, not Nick’s
but the jockey, “My Old Man,” with whom, around the race-courses of France and
Italy, the young narrator has had a perfect time out, with no mother or woman in
sight. When his father falls in a steeplechase and is killed, the son is left to bear not
just his grief but also the discovery that his father had been crooked. It is more than
a life that has been lost. As he overhears the name of his father being besmirched,
it seems to the boy “like when they get started, they don’t leave a guy nothing.”
“It was all a nothing,” observes the lonely protagonist of “A Clean Well-Lighted
Place” (Winner Take Nothing (1933)), “and man was a nothing too.” In the face
of palpable nothing, meaninglessness, there are, finally, only the imperatives of
conduct and communion with one’s own solitariness. “I did not care what it was
all about,” Jake confides in The Sun Also Rises. “All I wanted to know was how to
live in it.” One way to “live in it,” in some of Hemingway’s novels, has a political slant.
To Have and Have Not (1937) is an emphatic protest against corruption, political
hypocrisy, and the immorality of gross inequality. For Whom the Bell TollsGGray_c04.indd 411ray_c 04 .indd 411 8 8/1/2011 7:53:56 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 56 AM