ERNEST HEMINGWAY
1899–1961
The Short Stories of Ernest
Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a comfortable suburb of Chicago. He never got over his birthplace. The memory of Oak Park and his profound understanding of its cultural and moral insularity haunted Hemingway, and he spent his life trying to flee it. Partly as a result, his life was a great and continuous adventure. This was also due, however, to the fact that he lived during one of the most eventful times in history. He wrote about that in the Preface to The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1938):
In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.
Those are two of the best sentences ever written by any writer about writing. No modern writer has a more distinctive style than Hemingway; you recognize him after the first few words. It is impossible to describe this style, or to define it; you have to read some Hemingway prose and then you will recognize it, too. The style is vigorous and masculine but also very sensitive. That is a hard contradiction to maintain, and Hemingway does not always succeed in doing so. None of his novels, it seems to me, not even The Sun Also Rises, which I think is the best of them, is able to maintain this contradiction for long, certainly not throughout the entire book. It is like a balancing act done on a high wire in a strong wind—without a pole. It cannot go on for very long without the acrobat falling.
There are wonderful things in the novels, especially in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms (read out loud to yourself the first page and the last page of the latter) and even in For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is too long. But the true Hemingway jewels are in the volume of short stories that he published in 1938. I especially would recommend “Big Two Hearted River,” Parts I and II; “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “Old Man at the Bridge,” and also the shortest of Hemingway’s novels, just a long short story, actually, The Old Man and the Sea, for which Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Not everyone appreciates “Big Two-Hearted River.” It is about a man who returns from the big world into which he has journeyed and where he has become famous. He comes back to a river that he fished long ago and fishes it again. Nothing happens but that. He sees no one and talks to no one; he just sets up his tent and makes his supper and sleeps there by the river, and the next day catches a bottle full of grasshoppers for bait and then fishes for the trout that are plentiful in the river. At the end of the day he goes away. There is no simpler story but also, it seems to me although I can’t say exactly why, no more perfect one. (Even if you don’t like to fish, which I do not.)
“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is only five pages long. I have read it many times, but each time I read it shivers go up and down my spine. It is about “a nothing that he knew too well.” The Spanish word for nothing is nada. This word rings through the story like a death knell. Hemingway knew about death. He was obsessed with it.
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is also about death—the death of a man in Africa of gangrene brought on by a small untreated wound. The story is also about stories, for the man, in his final delirium, remembers all the stories he wanted to write but could not. As such it is a kind of tour de force, but a magnificent one.
Hemingway wrote “Old Man at the Bridge” in 1937 or 1938, during the Spanish Civil War. He had always loved Spain and had written extraordinary things about the country and its people and about bullfights. Now Spain was tearing itself to pieces, and he went back as a journalist, because he couldn’t stay away. He saw everything and would write For Whom the Bell Tolls about that war, which, as he knew very well and predicted often, was only a rehearsal for the greater war that would follow, throughout all of Europe and indeed the whole world. He sent back the four pages of “Old Man at the Bridge” by cable from a town in the delta of the Ebro River. The story tells of an old man who is caught by the war, trapped between the two sides in that brutal civil conflict, even though, as he says, he has no politics. “I was taking care of animals,” he says. Two goats and a cat and four pairs of pigeons.
“The cat, of course, will be all right,” the old man says. He is so tired that he cannot walk any longer, even if the enemy comes. “A cat can look out for itself, but I cannot think what will become of the others.”
That sentence sums up, for me, all the terror and cruelty and sadness of war. It was the sort of thing that Hemingway knew more about than almost any writer of our time.
E.B. WHITE
1899–1985
Charlotte’s Web
Elwyn Brooks White was always called Andy by his friends, doubtless because no grown man should have to be called Elwyn.
White was born in 1899, five years after James Thurber. The two became friends during the 1920s, and began to write books together, notably Is Sex Necessary? in 1933. They also worked together on the New Yorker. Thurber produced his cartoons and White wrote the opening page or so of “The Talk of the Town” and performed other necessary editorial chores. White’s casual pieces for the New Yorker during his many years of association with the magazine are among the finest things of the sort ever written in America, and several collections of them—The Second Tree from the Corner, for example, and The White Flag—retain the same liveliness that they had when they first appeared. A feature he wrote for Holiday magazine called “Here Is New York” may also be the best thing ever written about that fabulous, perilous city.
Such works by E.B. White are, however, mere ephemera compared to his two children’s novels, Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. The latter is so obviously and ineluctably a classic that it almost does not need to be recommended to anybody. But you may have missed it as a child. In that case, do not wait even one minute more. White must have had his tongue in his cheek when he came to dream up the story of Charlotte’s Web. But maybe he did not; maybe he had done some very astute research into the history of children’s literature. He would have found that although some classic works for children have “nice” characters in them, many do not, like The Wind in the Willows and the Peter Rabbit stories and White Fang and Where the Wild Things Are—to name only a handful of famous children’s books about creatures very different from good little boys and girls and sweet little puppies and kittens. At any rate, White came up with a trio of characters that must have shocked his editors: a pig, a spider, and a rat. But he wove out of their lives together a story that will last forever.