The Hemingway Short Story: A Study in Craft for Writers and Readers.

Knodt, Ellen Andrews

The Hemingway Short Story: A Study in Craft for Writers and Readers. By Robert Paul Lamb. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. 240 pp. Cloth $45.00. Paper $21.50.

In this companion volume to Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story, Robert Paul Lamb extends his outstanding study of Hemingway's craft. The previous volume, reviewed in The Hemingway Review 30.1 (Fall 2010), sets forth Lambs convincing examination of Hemingway s contributions to the short story genre, introduces readers of Hemingway to new terms for analyzing Hemingway's writing, and links Hemingway to authors who preceded him, his contemporaries, and his heirs.

This sequel may be read valuably without having read Art Matters, but the two taken together solidify understanding of Lamb's analytic technique and applications to Hemingway's stories of familiar concepts such as repetition and juxtaposition, as well as Lamb's coinage of new terms such as "sequence displacement," Hemingway's alteration of chronological order. In this second volume, Lamb defines his terms briefly and illustrates their use so that readers understand their meaning and can see their application.

The Hemingway Short Story allows Lamb to demonstrate the advantages that really close reading can bring to the short story by meticulously examining one story, "Indian Camp," over eighty-five pages of his book. Although some scholars have probably had difficulty sustaining a critical analysis of twenty pages on a short story, Lamb puts all these efforts to shame. He argues convincingly in his Preface and elsewhere in the book that critics must engage in very close reading that teases out the author's choices or risk substituting assumptions for evidence, resulting in misreading. Lamb's "first premise is that a writer is not merely a social construction, a site upon which cultural forces contend, but a complex human being, a professional in his or her craft, and capable of agency in consciously making decisions that create a literary text from blank pages of paper"(xii). He notes that creative writing classes study Hemingway's craft while current literary criticism focuses on "gender, sexuality, ideological, historicist, and biographical studies.... Such a division is nonsensical because an understanding of art informs, complicates, and deepens cultural studies ..."(xiv). Readers of The Hemingway Review may greet Lamb's conclusion as support of their approach to Hemingway's fiction: "I can't state it too strongly--what a text means and how it means are interconnected. Form and content are two sides of the same coin" (xv).

Of course Hemingway himself, quoted in letters and other discussions of writing, is an ally to Lamb in his focus on the conscious choices authors make. But Lamb liberally quotes from another prose stylist whose advice on writing short fiction he feels has been overlooked: Flannery O'Connor, whom Lamb lauds as the "patron saint of this book" (149). O'Connor could have been commenting on Hemingway when she writes, "more happens in modern fiction--with less furor on the surface--than has ever happened in fiction before" (qtd in Lamb 119).

One may well ask, what does Lamb's meticulous account of "Indian Camp" reveal? Lamb reviews the context of "Indian Camp" including its writing history, Hemingway's relationship with his father and uncle, his familiarity with northern Michigan, and his recent fatherhood. Then Lamb examines the "failure" of the original beginning of the story omitted by Hemingway from the published version, but later published posthumously as "Three Shots" in The Nick Adams Stories (1972). Lamb explains that Hemingway's choices in "Three Shots" confuse readers because the sequence of actions describing Nick Adams's fright at being left alone in a tent while his father and Uncle George fish at night violates Hemingway's own developing sense of "showing" rather than "telling": "Because he directly stated Nick's fear of dying, Hemingway now feels compelled to sketch the history of that fear by way of yet another explanation" (20). After the removal of this inauspicious beginning, Hemingway's published story "Indian Camp" is a triumph, according to Lamb: '"Indian Camp' is a remarkably compressed story that eschews authorial explanations and makes its appeal to the reader's senses in an efficient, suggestive prose...." (26).

Lamb then examines Nick's focal point as child-observer, allowing the reader to experience the story as Nick does. Every action of Dr. Adams, Uncle George, and the Native Americans is analyzed as to its implications and effect on Nick. While readers may disagree with Lamb about Uncle George's role or whether Dr. Adams's allowing Nick to be in the shanty for the caesarian birth was "unconscionable" (69), his careful analysis reveals the myriad of choices Hemingway makes to produce this powerful story. In my opinion, Lamb's analysis of the final paragraphs of "Indian Camp" helps one make sense of Nick's last thought, which has generated so much critical discussion:

   ... it expresses Nick's feeling that the world of the Indian camp is
   not his world. His is the world ... where the sun comes up and fish
   jump and the water feels warm in the morning chill. This bountiful
   and natural world asserts its reality and eases the nightmare
   of the dark and bloody Indian camp with its silent Indians, dying
   fathers, and screaming mothers. Immersed as he is in the natural
   world, it is altogether believable that Nick would have ... ["felt
   quite sure that he would never die."] (75).

Lamb turns from his almost line-by-line analysis of "Indian Camp" to look at four other stories, each of which he feels has been at the mercy of critics' varying assumptions, rather than what he calls "craft analysis ... essential to understanding a story's larger cultural significance (89)." The first of these is "Soldier's Home." Lamb argues that critics have often focused on only one half of the story--on Krebs's war experiences or on his mother's conversations. Lamb forcefully demonstrates that the whole story needs to be considered.

For "A Canary for One," Lamb asserts that most criticism relies on Hemingway's impending divorce from Hadley and subsequent marriage to Pauline as a way to establish meaning (112-113). In contrast, Lamb prefers to focus on "what the story is and how it works"(113). He points out that the last sentence is often taken to be a "twist" or "snapper": "We were returning to Paris to set up separate residences," which some critics have regarded as a "cheap trick"(l 14). But Lamb wishes for us to re-read the story and watch how Hemingway makes "the reader viscerally feel the emotional state of the husband/narrator during the train ride to Paris" (119). Lamb sees the story as an example of "a major innovative Hemingway technique" (125), "the narrator refraining from directly expressing his feelings and instead revealing those feelings by the concrete details he reports" (125). Lamb cites several examples of this technique, but perhaps none carries the importance as the narrator's "second and final speech": "'Look,' I said. 'There's been a wreck." (146). Lamb notes that "his statement serves six functions (a remarkable example of Hemingway's dialogue compression) that bring together several strands of the story in a complex, multileveled speech act" (146).

The final two stories analyzed in The Hemingway Short Story are "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" and "Big Two-Hearted River," each of which allows Lamb to make his point that "an understanding of form, craft, art, and technique contributes to cultural studies approaches" and serves to guard against "criticism that proceeds through generalization ... to an ideologically determined critical end"(155). After mentioning the few and sometimes speculative critical interpretations of the "Christmas story," Lamb, through his analysis, provides an answer to the function of the story's narrator and the meaning of the story as one of "semiotic confusion" (155), or the failure of understanding of all four characters.

Lambs look at "Big Two-Hearted River" includes a discussion of Hemingway's original ending (published posthumously as "On Writing" in The Nick Adams Stories (1972), which he omitted as "mental conversation" and "shit" (qtd. in Lamb 172). Just as Lamb explained Hemingway's good judgment for eliminating the beginning of "Indian Camp," here he examines Hemingway's reasons for omitting "On Writing" against the backdrop of such critical interpretations of the story as "war-wound thesis," "childhood-wound thesis," and J. Gerald Kennedy's "crisis of exile" thesis, in which the author, writing in Paris, now realizes that "the country that he had loved existed for him now only in memory and imagination" (qtd. in Lamb 177). Largely agreeing with Kennedy, Lamb, as before, resists choosing one interpretation but recommends readers keep in mind that "to save the past, the writer must maintain a considered distance, and he must shape it through art"(179).

Lamb posits that Hemingway subsumed his childhood in Michigan, his war experiences, his marriage, and his anxiety over writing the way he knew he wanted to ("It was so damned hard to write well...") in the text of "Big Two Hearted River"(181). Thus the story, for Lamb, is "metafictional," containing both the struggle Nick goes through to reach the river, make camp, and fish and the struggle Hemingway feels to write, coupled by the joy of a (finally) successful day of fishing for Nick and a successful finish of writing the story for Hemingway (191). Through this novel reading of the story as a combination of the deleted "On Writing" and Nick's fishing trip in northern Michigan, Hemingway's readers will recognize many other texts in which the author's philosophy of writing and his struggles to write form either the overt or hid den text of his fiction. In this excellent study of several examples of Hemingway's layered, complex short stories, Robert Paul Lamb has given us new ways to understand Hemingway's craft.

Ellen Andrews Knodt

Penn State Abington