Three Stories

An early effort

Three Stories and Ten Poems by Ernest Hemingway

I want to talk most of all about the story ‘My Old Man.’ It’s not considered a particularly great story. It’s not thought of as one of the author’s best. But I want to talk about it in large part because few others have. Or have done satisfactorily. To my taste.

So instead, I’d like to think about it a little.

We have, in this story, a boy and his father. The father is a jockey, overweight and too old, and his boy is being unhappily and unwillingly inducted into how the world works. These lessons take a number of forms.

One thing I don’t often see in the commentary on this story is the harsh exertion it contains. As the father attempts to make weight and to stay in shape so as to do his work. How pitiable it seems, especially after a century’s advancement in physical conditioning. The jockey — the boy’s father — has to achieve the right weight, so he can stand the best chance of winning and so he does not lose his job. This effort mostly consists, rather like preparing these days to star as a leading man in a Hollywood film, of being comprehensively dehydrated.

Doing all of these terrible old-time things in order — and this is surely pseudo-scientific — to sweat the weight off.

In a Brigadier Gerard story by Arthur Conan Doyle, I’m reminded, Gerard is set upon by a boxing champion who has just finished his making-weight routine of putting on a heavy greatcoat, buttoning it up to this chin, and running about in the hot, hot sun until he is nearly perspiring to death. This is after, of course, the same boxing champion has been exercising his arms by lifting and manoeuvring those strange old-time wooden batons which served as weights before the steel weights later came in. All of this hinterland is kept in mind, or at least in my mind, while I read ‘My Old Man.’

In theory, all exercise, especially elite athletic exercise, exercise necessary to make the grade, is difficult and unpleasant to do. (I disagree, at least in reference to exercise in the mid-2020s. Exercise is fun. That’s the reason we do it. For fun.) But the exercises forced on our protagonist’s father in ‘My Old Man’ are not fun. And they are not only difficult and humiliating and so on. They’re also pointless and unsuccessful.

They all seem in vain; they seem tragic; they seem pitiable. He’s torturing himself, and mostly not succeeding, for what? That is what the reader is meant to think. At least I do. That all of this is for nothing, that it will not get better, that the protagonist’s father is falling and failing and everything he’s ever tried to do is collapsing.

Can he see it? Not entirely. There’s despair in his manner, in the mood he’s giving off. But that could be for any number of reasons. We see, in our own lives, people in denial of their ageing, of their loss of capacity. And many of those people, I’m prepared to bet, focus on one or other goal with new focus and attention. Rather than think of the wrack and ruin of the body, the failing of the mind, they tell themselves, if only I can manage this, or keep this going. Nothing else matters quite so much. My whole life will now be orientated around the continued spinning of this particular plate. The rest fall where they may.

As a displacement activity, there’s something to be said for it. A few people even become good at the thing they took up or focused upon only in search of a distraction. But it’s no way for someone hoping to keep the show on the road to behave. It’s just denial given one particular form. It’s the dispirited former robber telling his confederates that he only knows one way to make money.

I won’t say too much about how the story goes because it’s in the public domain and you really could read it yourself, if you wanted. But I will say something else about the other two of this trifecta.

‘Out of Season’ is reproduced in In Our Time and is the subject of some scholarly interest. I don’t want to talk about the things that interest scholars, because of course they do not matter. Instead, I want to mention briefly ideas of place and mood. The place is northern Italy, and the ostensible subject is a young American couple, tourists, hiring a local man to be their guide. There’s great strangeness, off-beatness, irresolution here. Failures of communication. Failures of all kinds.

For minimal writing where much more is said than is actually said, Hemingway did better in other places. But as an early effort, this is remarkable. A statement of what was to come.

‘Up in Michigan’ has been danced around for a hundred years by weak-minded academics and occasionally denounced as a terrible thing by some critics. The weak-minded have called it ‘controversial’ or perhaps ‘unpleasant.’ But that’s not the half of it. ‘Up in Michigan’ is about a rape and, in a style that’s remarkably stark and matter-of-fact, it’s about the truth of the matter in an awful instance like that. Which is that life does not cease, as it might in a film, with a cut to black at the moment of most horror. And the victims and participants have to get up and to comport themselves in the moments following these crimes. And they have to try to think and to react to what has happened.