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5 Hemingway on (Mis)Writing Stories “Big Two-Hearted River” as Metafiction Painting, Henri, is damned difficult. . . . You always believe you’ve taken hold of it, but you never have. . . . There is a different craft for each object. You never know your whole craft. . . . I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping, and it would still seem to me as if I knew nothing . . . . I consume myself, kill myself, to cover fifty centimeters of canvas. . . . It doesn’t matter. . . . That’s life. . . . I want to die painting. . . . —Paul Cézanne, quoted in Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne (translation mine) A life of action is much easier to me than writing. I have greater facility for action than for writing. In action I do not worry any more. Once it is bad enough you get a sort of elation because there is nothing you can do except what you are doing and you have no responsibility. But writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done—so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well. —Hemingway to Ivan Kashkin (1935), Selected Letters In this chapter we move from a story about mutilation and despair to one about healing and hope, from a callow narrator undergoing an initiation into the complexities of human society to an experienced protagonist immersing himself in the non-human world. We also move from a story about reading texts to one about writing them, from metacriticism to metafiction. Hemingway chose to conclude In Our Time with Nick’s search for spiritual renewal in nature, but he also decided to close with a story about writing stories, the very process by which he himself sought emotional healing and regeneration. As a story about the writing of stories, including the writing of itself, “Big Two-Hearted River” is an equally appropriate choice to conclude my two-volume study of Hemingway’s art of the short story. In effect, this dying critic will respectfully defer to his dead author and let him have the final word. 168 Metacritical and Metafictional Hemingway I Hemingway began “Big Two-Hearted River” in Paris in mid-May 1924, and completed what would become the first part of the story when his work was interrupted by magazine editorial duties and a trip to Pamplona for the bullfights. In Spain, he enjoyed trout fishing on the Irati River with John Dos Passos and Robert McAlmon, but he was also burdened by financial needs, his responsibilities to his wife and small child, and fears that he would not be able to write. Nevertheless, he managed to finish the first version of the full story before returning to Paris in July, and sometime in late summer decided to divide it formally into two parts. In October , in response to Gertrude Stein’s comment that “remarks are not literature ,” he deleted the final nine pages of the text, in which he had written directly about actual people and events from his life, and, after several attempts , eventually rewrote the ending to his satisfaction. The story was subsequently published in the first issue of This Quarter in May 1925, and republished as the last full story of In Our Time in October, formally divided into two parts with a chapter/vignette from in our time placed between them. Hemingway considered it by far the finest story he had written to that point.1 Others shared this assessment, and “Big Two-Hearted River” quickly assumed a central place in the Hemingway canon, a rank forever secured when Malcolm Cowley, in his introduction to The Portable Hemingway (1945), made it the key to his interpretation of Hemingway’s writing. Cowley ’s essay—which stressed the repetition of themes in Hemingway’s fiction , the haunted consciousnesses of his protagonists, and their attempts to escape from a world of danger and pain through “the faithful observance of customs they invent for themselves”—implicitly linked “Big Two-Hearted River” to Nick’s experience of war.2 Seven years later, in the first major, full-length study of Hemingway, Philip Young further developed this “war-wound” thesis. Young’s two main arguments were that the Hemingway hero is “pretty close to being Hemingway himself” and that “one fact about this recurrent protagonist, as about the man who created him, is necessary to any real...

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