In Our Time is the first collection of short stories written by Ernest Hemingway. It was published by Boni & Liveright in New York in 1925 after a shorter edition of the book, titled in our time, had been published in Paris in 1924.[1] The volume contains several well-known Hemingway stories, including the Nick Adams stories "Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," "The Three Day Blow," and "The Battler", and introduces readers to Hemingway's distinctive style. A subsequent edition, published in 1930, included "On the Quai at Smyrna".
The 1924 Parisian edition, in our time, consisted of 32 pages and was published in a small edition of 170 copies and contained only the vignettes later used as interchapters for In Our Time,[2] though some of these vignettes, like "A Very Short Story" and "The Revolutionist," were treated as full short stories in the later collection.
The title comes from the English Book of Common Prayer: "give us peace in our time, O Lord", suggested to Hemingway by Ezra Pound. At the time of its publication, the book was recognized as a significant development in prose fiction, for its spare language and oblique depiction of the psychological states of the characters portrayed.
Contents |
Soon after their marriage in September 1921, Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson moved from Illinois to Paris, following Sherwood Anderson's advice that the city was inexpensive and a good place for a young writer to live. There Hemingway met Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce. He worked for the The Toronto Star as an international correspondent, and traveled around Europe reporting on the Greco-Turkish War and sporting events in Spain and Germany.[3] He continued to write fiction and a few pieces of juvenilia he brought to Paris such as "Up in Michigan", a story Gertrude Stein judged unfit for publication.[4]
All of his writing was lost in 1922 when a suitcase packed by Hadley containing all his manuscripts and their duplicates was stolen from the Gare de Lyons and never recovered. Hemingway was furious and distraught, but Ezra Pound told him he had only lost the time it would take to rewrite the pieces. Hemingway either took Pound's advice and rewrote the lost pieces, or he wrote new work; by the end of 1923 he had the 18 sketches that became in our time.[4]
The piece became a work in progress, keeping the same title, and sections were published in 1923, 1924 and 1925. In April 1923 six vignettes, none over 200 words, appeared in the April edition of The Little Review under the title "In Our Time". These were later published with 12 others in the Paris edition of in our time, and as "interchapters" in the 1925 American edition.[5] Late in 1924 he had finished the stories that were published in the American edition of In Our Time, saying of his work, "I've worked like hell most of the time and think the stuff gets better."[6]
The high-end printing company, Three Mountains Press, was founded in the early 1920s by Bill Bird, a journalist stationed in Paris. He hired Ezra Pound as his editor, who sought to "keep the series strictly modern". Their aim was to publish well-produced limited private editions by a handful of modern authors, including Pound himself and Joyce, in small print-runs. Hemingway, who was unpublished, gave Bird a manuscript of vignettes that he titled Blank,[7] later titled in our time from the Book of Common Prayer.[8] The book was first published in Paris in 1924 on hand-made paper in a 38-page volume with a print-run of 170. It included 18 vignettes written the year before, presented as untitled chapters. The pieces were meant to convey a sense of journalism or news, so Bird designed a distinctive dust-jacket showing a collage of newspaper articles.[9]
The later American edition of In Our Time was to include a collection of short stories as well as the vignettes printed in the Parisian run. Most of the stories were written in 1924.[4] Boni & Liveright published the book in 1925, with a print-run of 1335 copies, costing $2 each.[10] Sixteen of the vignettes from the earlier Parisian edition were kept as numbered interchapter sketches; two had been published in his first book "Three Stories and 10 poems"; two were from in our time; six had been published in literary magazines. Four had never been published before.[11]
The 18 vignettes written in 1923 were presented as numbered chapters.[12] They were based on contemporary news items (Chapters 3, 6, 9, and 17), war experiences and bull-fighting. One seven paragraph vignette—published as Chapter 10—about a World War I soldier's love affair with a Red Cross nurse,[13] was based on Hemingway's affair with Agnes von Kurowsky during his hospitalization in Milan after an injury sustained at the Italian front during WWI. The other WWI pieces (Chapters 1, 4, 5 and 7) may have been based on stories told him by his friend Chink Dorman-Smith.[14][15] The piece about a robbery and murder in Kansas City (Chapter 9), was inspired by newspaper story Hemingway covered while a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star. Chapter 2, and 11 - 16 were written after his first trip to Spain and depict the world of bullfighting.[16][17]
Sixteen of the 18 vignettes published in in our time were incorporated into In Our Time as interchapter pieces and renumbered;[18] two were rewritten as short stories—one was rewritten as the short story "The Revolutionist", and the love story was rewritten as "A Very Short Story".[19] In Our Time includes 14 short stories, almost all written in 1924, and many are considered some of Hemingway's best short fiction.
The volume began with two stories linked thematically, set in Michigan, introducing young Nick Adams: "Indian Camp" and "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife". "The End of Something" is a story about Nick as a teenager breaking up with a girl; the next story, "Three-Day Blow", has Nick and a friend Bill spending three days at a lake, drinking and talking. In "The Battler", as he returns home from WWI, Nick meets a prize-fighter. This is followed by "A Very Short Story", a WWI love story set in Italy; "Soldier's Home" is set in Kansas; and "The Revolutionist" again is set in Italy. Three marriage stories follow: "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot", "Cat in the Rain" and "Out of Season". Nick reappears in "Cross Country Snow", set in Switzerland. "My Old Man" is set in Paris. The volume ends with the two-part story "The Big Two-Hearted River", set in Michigan and featuring Nick Adams. Newer editions of the volume begin with "On the Quai at Smyrna".
According to Hemingway scholar Wendolyn Tetlow the vignettes, interchapters and short stories published as different permutations of "In Our Time" are united thematically. In August 1923, after the publication of first six and the finalization of the next 12, Hemingway described them in a letter to Pound: "When they are read together, they all hook up....The bulls start, then reappear, then finish off. The war starts clear and noble just like it did...gets close and blurred and finished with the feller who goes home and gets clap."[20] He went on to tell Pound, "it has form all right".[21]
The first interchapter was written as a single paragraph and first published in The Little Review. Reflective of the style of the finished work, it is tightly compressed showing Hemingway's utilization of Pound's imagist theories, and in its detachment, echoes T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The small paragraph shows Hemingway, as Pound had done in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, treating WWI with bitterness. Moreover, Hemingway took Pound's advice and used words sparingly—achieving the spareness of style for which he was to become famous.[22]
Hemingway biographer James Mellow believes 'In Our Time to be Hemingway's most experimental book in that it transcends a mere collection of stories. He believes that in this, Hemingway's first published book, he established the primary themes to which he returned during his career as an author. The stories in the book establish themes such as initiation rites and early love, marriage problems, disappointment in family life, and the importance of male comradeship. The in our time vignettes, or interchapters, concern war, bullfighting and crime—all topics Hemingway returned to in his later work. Mellow believes the invention of Nick Adams was "vital to Hemingway's career". From the first story, "Indian Camp", which introduces Adams as a young boy, the character is a doppelgänger, a conduit through whom Hemingway expresses his own experiences. The second story, "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife", considered by Mellow as one of Hemingway's major stories, is important because through Nick, Hemingway regales his childhood experiences with his parents.[23]
"The Big-Two Hearted River", a two-part story, finishes the collection. It was designed and written to be the concluding and climatic piece of In Our Time. In describing the piece to Gertrude Stein, Hemingway wrote he was "trying to do the country with Cézanne." Nothing much happens in the story—nothing much is meant to happen. The surface details mask the deep inner turmoil Nick Adams feels after returning from the war; the sojourn on the river is to function as a place of tranquility and rehabilitation for him.[24]
Hemingway's writing style attracted attention when in our time was published. Edmund Wilson described the writing as "of the first destinction", enough to bring attention to the work.[25]
In Our Time was praised by literary critics when it was published in 1925, and Mellow says of the book that it is one of Hemingway's masterpieces, although ironically his parents hated it and referred to it as "filth".[26]