Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature

4. Performing Maleness

C h a p t e r f o u r Performing Maleness Hemingway Whenever I teach a course in twentieth-century American literature, a task I perform at least once a year, I begin with Hemingway (1899–1961). Not with The Sun Also Rises (1926), but with In Our Time, and with its second story, “Indian Camp.” Why not begin with “On the Quai at Smyrna,” the first story in the book? In reading a career so obsessed with beginnings—with the excitement and peril of setting out, and with the difficulty of moving forward with hope—why finesse the whole issue by not starting where Hemingway himself appears to ask us to start? In Our Time is itself a repeated act of beginning, a book Hemingway reconfigured twice. The first version was published in Paris as in our time in January 1924 and consisted solely of the language games of the italicized vignettes. A year later Hemingway brought out In Our Time. The 1925 version interposes fourteen short stories among the vignettes, a sequence that begins with “Indian Camp.” (“Indian Camp” was the first of the nine stories Hemingway wrote in a burst of creativity during the winter and spring of 1924.) In 1930, Hemingway brought out a third version of In Our Time, now beginning with “On the Quai at Smyrna.” A first version of the story had been written in 1926, and a revised version—the one we now have—was added by Hemingway at the request of Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribners. The copyright page of contemporary editions reads: “‘On the Quai at Smyrna’ was first published as the introduction to the 1930 edition of IN OUR TIME.” Despite the pride of place given to “On the Quai at Smyrna” in the final published version, forty years of reading Hemingway have convinced me that “Indian Camp” is the true beginning of Nick Adams’s story and of Hemingway’s career. “No end and no beginning,” the voice speaking in chapter 2 says in evident horror at the retreat from Adrianople. In positing ends and beginnings, stories impose a punctuation that experience itself does not provide. Given the contours of his life and the temper of his imagination, Hemingway had an easier time inventing ends than in imagining beginnings. As a consequence, in his first book he provides the definitive moment of setting out and also proceeds to obscure it. The initiation Nick Adams undergoes in “Indian Camp” is the key recognition scene in Hemingway’s 54 Secret Histories work and one of the most significant in the American literature of his century, a pedagogical moment so foundational and so terrifying that Hemingway eventually chose to protect the reader from its uncanny power by appearing to locate his beginning somewhere else. The major obstacle to understanding In Our Time arises from the history of its publication as driven by the desire to start with a false start. This claim is bolstered by the fact that, in the original submission to publisher Horace Liveright in 1925, Hemingway positioned “Up in Michigan” as the first story in the sequence and “Indian Camp” as the second. After Liveright objected to the sexuality in “Up in Michigan,” Hemingway agreed to replace it with “The Battler” and moved “Indian Camp” to the head of the book. By deciding, finally, not to begin with Nick, Hemingway distracts attention from the psychological and toward the technical, away from Nick’s romance of education and growth and toward the experiment with voice that links “On the Quai at Smyrna” more powerfully to the vignettes than to the short stories. Our attention will nevertheless be directed toward Nick Adams as the core figure, and we will come to follow his story as the most compelling dimension of the book. Nick’s story culminates in “Big-Two-Hearted River,” in which he returns to the landscape of “Indian Camp” in order to restart his story on his own terms. Between the beginning and the return, Nick sees his father humiliated, ends an affair, drinks and talks with a friend, confronts incest and homosexuality, is wounded in war, and then passes through a series of veiled avatars—a numb veteran, a friend of a jailed revolutionary, a partner in three failed marriages—before reentering the text as the anxious husband in “Cross-Country Snow” who plucks his mind out while skiing in lieu of confronting the “hell” of his wife’s pregnancy. After all this, in...