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Hemingway's "Out of Season":
The Importance of Close Reading
Charles J. Nolan, Jr.
U.S. Naval Academy
In a newsy and wide-ranging letter to Fitzgerald shortly before
Christmas in 1925, Hemingway made some significant comments about
one of his earliest stories, "Out of Season," which
had appeared first in Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923)
and then became part of In Our Time (1925). He ranked,
for example, the first and last paragraphs of the story along
with "Indian Camp," "Soldier's Home," and
"Big Two-Hearted River" as the best of his work ("Grade
I") in his recent collection, and he indicated that the story
was "an almost literal transcription" of an experience
that he had had with Hadley (Baker, Selected Letters 180)
when they were in Cortina D'Ampezzo in 1923. As he noted, he wrote
the piece "right off on the typewriter without punctuation"
after he returned from the abortive fishing trip chronicled in
it. But then he made a remark that has helped to shape subsequent
commentary on the story: "I meant it to be a tragic [one]
about the drunk of a guide because I reported him to the hotel
owner ... and he fired him and as that was the last job he had
in town and he was quite drunk and very desperate, hanged himself
in the stable" (180-81). Later, in A Moveable Feast
(1964), Hemingway noted that he had left out this "real end"
of the work on his "new theory that you could omit anything
if you knew that you omitted [it] and the omitted part would strengthen
the story and make people feel something more than they understood"
(75). As interesting as these comments are, they have led us to
focus on specific aspects of the piece rather than to treat it
as an artistic whole. Paul Smith was right in pointing out that
the story has been "Too often slighted as a work of art and
too often cited as proof positive of the myth Hemingway invented
to give some form to his first venture into original fiction"
(Smith, A Reader's Guide 21). "Out of Season,"
then, deserves the kind of close reading that other Hemingway
stories have received.1
In these postmodern, post-structuralist days, it may seem critically
naive to use a methodology that has fallen out of favor, and yet
what explication de texte, supplemented by a careful review
of the manuscripts and by a variety of critical commentary, provides
is a way of seeing just how skillful Hemingway really was. It
is true, of course, that what a book like Carl Eby's very recent
psychoanalytic treatment of Hemingway's fetishism or a gendered
reading of the Hemingway canon like that of Comley and Scholes
can tell us is intensely interesting, even exciting. We would
be the poorer, less aware of how multiple perspectives can enrich
our understanding of a complex text, without them. But what close
reading can do is to show us the choices that a writer makes along
the way, the small but ultimately essential elements of a text
that lead us toward its larger meaning. No one would want to be
without the theoretical tools that our time has given us, but
neither do we want to discard willy-nilly an earlier method whose
history has been so illustrious. Like other Hemingway stories
that have yielded their treasures under close analysis, "Out
of Season" offers similar but as yet untapped rewards.
Almost everyone, beginning with Hemingway himself (A Moveable
Feast 75), has noted that this was the first story he wrote
after that famous suitcase containing all but two of his manuscripts
had been stolen at the Gare de Lyon. Originally intending to call
the story "Before the Season," which he pencilled in
on the typescript (Item 644 1), Hemingway eventually changed the
title to take advantage of the symbolic connection he could make
between the couple's marriage and the illegal fishing. Carlos
Baker was one of the earliest to notice that such a "metaphorical
confluence of emotional atmospheres ... was what gave the story
its considerable distinction" and that this technique "was
the foremost esthetic discovery of Ernest's early career"
(A Life Story 109).2
The story's first sentence -- "On the four lire Peduzzi
had earned by spading the hotel garden he got quite drunk"
("Out of Season,"Complete Short Stories 135)
-- is the kind we have come to expect from Hemingway, who had
a genius for effective openings. The line immediately characterizes
the fishing guide,3 whose desire for the bottle has
already ruined his standing in the town and will soon shape his
actions with the young couple. When he sees the "young gentleman,"4
for example, Peduzzi speaks to him "mysteriously," thereby
graphically revealing his intoxication. Three sentences later
the guide is again described as "mysterious," and again
that quality is linked with drink: he is allowed three more glasses
of wine on credit because of his sense of confidence and mystery
about his job with the couple that afternoon.
The manuscripts are revealing here.5 In the typescript,
Hemingway struck through the period at the end of the second sentence
and typed in mysteriously between the double-spaced lines
(Item 644 1), but mysterious does not appear until the
setting copy (Item 203 1) for Three Stories and Ten Poems.
As Paul Smith has noted, "The adverb mysteriously
was an initial addition and the adjective mysterious a
final one" ("Some Misconceptions" 243). Clearly,
Hemingway uses the repetition to emphasize Peduzzi's attachment
to drink as he will when he repeats the phrase "A wonderful
day" at various points throughout the story. The first of
these comes just two sentences later when the guide, flush with
alcohol-induced exhilaration, thinks to himself that the misty
afternoon with the sun going in and out is "wonderful."
When the young gentleman comes out of the hotel after lunch and
asks if his wife should follow them with the fishing rods, Peduzzi
indicates that she should, and the three start off with the young
woman lagging behind. Almost immediately, though, the guide changes
his mind, wanting all three of them to walk down the street together,
probably so that he can show off to the townspeople (Jackson 14).
To get the woman to come up with her husband and him, Peduzzi
does the first of a number of inappropriate things he will do
that afternoon: he winks at the young gentleman and then calls
the woman "Signorina" instead of "Signora,"
though he immediately switches to the more accurate title. Not
surprisingly, the young woman's response is to stay where she
is, walking "sullenly" behind. Again Peduzzi calls to
the "Signorina," this time "tenderly," to
come up with them, but only after her husband shouts at her does
she join the two men. The wife's actions here and the husband's
shouting at her, clear indications that something is amiss, begin
to shift our attention to the young couple.6
But, as the three walk down the main street, it is still Peduzzi
we are concerned with. Pleased with himself in his drunken sense
of newfound status, the guide greets everyone he meets "elaborately,"
tipping his hat and saying hello to the bank clerk, whose cold
stare is replicated by others who are watching from in front of
the stores. Though the laborers working on the foundation of the
new hotel look up, they too say nothing and refuse any sign of
greeting. Only the beggar, "lean and old, with a spittle-thickened
beard" (136), acknowledges Peduzzi, who now stops in front
of a wine shop and asks the couple if they would like to take
along something to drink. "A little marsala?" he wants
to know, once again inappropriately alternating between "Signora"
and "Signorina" in his reference to or his direct questioning
of the young woman. For her part, she is having none of him; she
stands "sullenly" (Hemingway repeats the word here for
emphasis), telling her husband that he will have "to play
up to this" and noting that she can't understand what the
guide is saying. She does recognize, however, that Peduzzi is
drunk. Meanwhile, her husband, lost in reverie, wonders what has
made the guide ask for marsala, the favorite drink of Max Beerbohm.
Hemingway's use of Beerbohm here is both functionally relevant
and rooted in his own biography. In terms of the story, the young
gentleman's thinking about the famous essayist and caricaturist
marks him as well educated and connected to the literary world;
if he knows what Beerbohm drinks, he probably knows the man himself.
And if he knows Beerbohm personally, he may be as witty and elegant,
as much a part of the contemporary social scene, as Beerbohm and
his friends. Or he may be aspiring to such a position of eminence.
The point is that with the allusion Hemingway is able to characterize
the young gentleman as, perhaps, a bit of a dandy and therefore
maybe a bit self-absorbed. As the story continues, we see how
such solipsism may be related to the quarrel the couple has had
earlier in the day. In terms of Hemingway's own life, Baker tells
of Beerbohm's serving marsala to the young writer and his journalist
colleagues in 1922 when Hemingway was covering the International
Economic Conference in Genoa and paid a visit to the older man
in Rapallo (A Life Story 89).7
To bring the young gentleman back to the present -- and to the
guide's own needs for more wine -- Peduzzi tugs at his client's
sleeve and asks for money alternately in German ("Geld")8
and in Italian ("Lire"). As McComas has noted,
a resident of Cortina, as Peduzzi is, would ordinarily be bilingual
because the town sits on the Austrian-Italian border (48) and
both countries had claimed the village (49). After the young gentleman
gives him ten lire, the guide tries to enter the wine shop but
finds the door locked. A passer-by "scornfully" tells
him that the store is closed until two, the adverb reminding us
again of Peduzzi's drunkenness and of his position in the town.
Though "He felt hurt," we learn, he immediately brightens,
telling the couple that they can get wine at the Concordia, a
hotel with a bar a little farther on (McComas 48), and the three
walk together down the street. But when they reach the hotel,
Peduzzi's actual position is again reestablished: the young gentleman
asks him (in German) what he would like, making clear that the
couple don't want him to go inside with them. The guide returns
the ten lire and replies with embarrassment. First he wants "Nothing,"
then "anything," then perhaps marsala, then he doesn't
know, and finally (as a question) "Marsala?" His uneasiness
springs from the fact that he has made his need for alcohol so
obvious and has thus reinforced his dependence on the couple,
whom he wants to pretend are his equals.
Once inside, the husband orders three marsalas, though the waitress,
seeing just the couple, asks if they want only two instead. When
the young gentleman tells her that the third is for a "vecchio,"
the woman laughs, "Oh, ... a vecchio," as she
pours the "muddy looking" wine. Perhaps she has seen
Peduzzi through the window and, knowing him, finds such an elevated
title uncalled for, as Smith suggests ("Some Misconceptions"
249), or perhaps she finds it humorous that the foreign couple
has been taken in by the disreputable guide (Steinke 68). In any
case, the young gentleman now puts one of the glasses in front
of his wife, suggesting that perhaps the wine will make her feel
better, though the next sentence makes such an improvement seem
unlikely: "She sat and looked at the glass." This kind
of matter-of-fact statement, which beautifully characterizes the
wife's attitude, is a technique Hemingway will continue to use
effectively throughout his life. Sensing her mood, her husband
goes outside with another glass of the marsala for Peduzzi but,
unable to find him, returns to his wife, who tells him that the
guide wanted "a quart of it." Her use of quart
instead of the European unit of measure quarter litre emphasizes
both her foreignness and the linguistic confusion running throughout
the story that serves as a metaphor for the couple's failure to
understand each other's feelings. The young gentleman, however,
asks properly how much a "quarter litre" costs and then,
the waitress having poured the marsala into the measure, asks
for a bottle as a container. This request amuses the waitress
too, recalling her earlier laughter at the young gentleman's use
of vecchio and casting the whole situation in a slightly
silly light.
As Paul Smith has shown in his discussion of the story's structure
("Some Misconceptions" 242-48), what happens at the
Concordia is at the center of the narrative architecturally as
well as thematically. This "ironic scene of discord"
in a place whose name denotes harmony (247-48) is powerfully rendered
in the dialogue between husband and wife:
"I'm sorry you feel so rotten,9 Tiny," he
said. "I'm sorry I talked the way I did at lunch. We were
both getting at the same thing from different angles."
"It doesn't make any difference," she said. "None
of it makes any difference."
"Are you too cold?" he asked. "I wish you'd worn
another sweater."
"I've got on three sweaters."10 (137)
Exactly what the earlier argument had been about has absorbed
a number of commentators. For some readers, Tiny's remark that
"None of it makes any difference" recalls another of
Hemingway's stories in which a couple argue as they do here, but
in that work the subject matter is clear: "Hills Like White
Elephants" is about whether the woman should have an abortion.
Relying on Freud's comments about mistakes and pointing to Tiny's
mishearing of Peduzzi's tochter (daughter) as "doctor,"
Kenneth Johnston was the first to argue that in this piece "the
quarrel clearly appears to center on the question of abortion"
(42).11 Though Meyers will speculate only that the
couple's argument is "probably related to Hadley's first
pregnancy" and that "the title may be an oblique allusion
to the unwanted baby" (154), Sheldon Grebstein points to
a number of "parallels and correlatives for the discord"
that suggest abortion as the subject (156), and Grimes, in seeing
Jig in "Hills Like White Elephants" as "a resolute
and more fully developed version of Tiny" (72), makes the
link between the two stories and their issues directly. Lynn also
connects this piece with the later work -- "'Out of Season:
Part Two,' [Hemingway] might have called it" (363) -- noting
that the quarrel here was surely about something more important
than illegal fishing and that the story's imagery ("manure,
mud, and the like") suggests "something morally unclean"
(203). And Mellow seems convinced that the couple's argument resulted
from the young gentleman's "broaching the subject of an abortion"
(224).
Not everyone, however, agrees. Sanderson, for example, points
out that we are never told exactly what the argument is about
(24), and Joseph Flora, admitting that the structure of In
Our Time provides the strongest support for those who favor
the abortion theory, nevertheless makes clear that the suggestions
of abortion are "so few" that "early commentators,
including Carlos Baker" missed them (Ernest Hemingway
32). Paul Smith reads what happens in the story as much more serious
than just an argument over abortion. He believes that the couple
have decided to end their marriage ("Some Misconceptions"
249),12 although James Steinke rejects such a "psychobiographical
notion," noting that "it is futile to seek details"
about the quarrel (63) and seeing the argument as part of the
"ordinary actuality" of everyday life (71). And for
those other biographically based readers who like to find in Gertrude
Stein's comments about Hemingway's distress over his wife's pregnancy
(262) an argument in favor of the abortion theory, Hadley's recent
biographer apparently rejects their claims, locating the story's
quarrel matter of factly in an argument that the young Hemingways
had over the fishing guide (Diliberto 149).
Whatever the nature of the argument, its continuation is interrupted
when the waitress returns with a brown bottle and fills it with
the marsala. After paying her another five lire and leaving her
again "amused" -- the third time Hemingway undercuts
what is going on -- the young gentleman and his wife confront
an anxious Peduzzi, who has been pacing back and forth outside.
"Come on," he calls, telling them that he will carry
the rods and assuring them that there will be no difficulties
because he knows the town's officials and because he has been
a soldier. "Everybody in this town likes me," he claims,
though, of course, we and the couple have seen what the villagers
really think of him. As the three walk down toward the river,
it starts to sprinkle, Hemingway using the weather, as he frequently
will in his work, to mirror the emotional climate.
To show off to his clients, Peduzzi now points out a girl standing
in the doorway of one of the houses as his daughter (tochter).
"His doctor," the wife wonders and then remarks disdainfully:
"[H]as he got to show us his doctor?" Understanding
some German, the young gentleman clarifies the guide's remark,
but with the exchange Hemingway underlines the many levels of miscommunication
that are central to the story. The girl, for her part, goes into
the house, clearly embarrassed by her father;13 her
action reminds us again of the guide's standing in the town. Continuing
their journey to the river, the three walk abreast with Peduzzi
speaking "rapidly with much winking and knowingness."
Once he even nudges the young woman familiarly. Again the inappropriateness
of his actions reflects his drunken state. Because he cannot figure
out what language the couple knows best, he speaks alternately
in the d'Ampezzo dialect and in Tyroler German, finally settling
on the German because the young gentleman answers him with "Ja,
Ja." In truth, however, the two young people understand
"nothing."
Now the husband's anxieties are awakened. He tells his wife that,
since the villagers saw them with their rods, the game police
are probably right behind them and claims that he wishes they
had not started, complaining as well about the guide's drunkenness.
His wife's retort is chilling but apt: "Of course you haven't
got the guts to just go back." Though Waldhorn sees Tiny
as "That ur-bitch character" with "ample
reserves of sallies" like this one (45), we have by now sided
with her. The young gentleman seems timid and ineffectual, a judgment
that becomes increasingly clear as the story continues. When he
attempts to placate her, suggesting that she return to the hotel,
she refuses, telling him that if he is going to jail, she might
as well be there too.
As they turn sharply down the bank, Peduzzi points to the river,
"brown and muddy"; a "dump heap" is off to
the side. As noted earlier, some commentators have used this imagery
along with the brown color of the marsala to argue in favor of
the abortion theory,14 but perhaps the ugly terrain
is just Hemingway's attempt to provide an appropriate backdrop
for a story in which a couple's relationship is strained. In any
case, at this point the guide apparently says something because
the young gentleman tells him to speak in Italian, and Peduzzi
blurts out that they have more than half an hour to go before
reaching their destination. The husband translates for his wife
and suggests again that she return to the hotel, adding: "It's
a rotten day and we aren't going to have any fun anyway"
(138). This time, having had enough and apparently convinced,
she agrees and starts up the hill. Down at the river's edge, Peduzzi
does not realize that the young woman is leaving until she has
almost disappeared. Frantically, he shouts at her, this time in
German, again ineptly attempting to persuade her to return by
flattering her: "Frau! Fraulein! You're not going."
As she goes out of sight, he is "shocked"; his glorious
plans are beginning to unravel.
To save what he can, Peduzzi begins to put the rods together
on the spot. When the young gentleman questions him, the guide
improvises. The fishing is good in both places, he claims. Though
the husband sits down and begins to join up the parts of his rod,
he is quite worried that "a gamekeeper or a posse of citizens"
(note the hyperbole) will arrive at any moment to arrest them.
Aware of the houses and the campanile behind them, he prepares
to fish. When he opens his leader box, Peduzzi clumsily sticks
his thumb and forefinger into it, tangling the leaders. Then,
from the guide's viewpoint, comes disaster. When he discovers
that his client has no lead to weight the lines, Peduzzi becomes
"excited": "You must have some lead.... You must
have piombo. Piombo. A little piombo....
You must have it. Just a little piombo." He goes through
his own pockets "desperately," but he has none either.
At this point, the young gentleman calls off the fishing trip
and begins to unjoint his rod, telling Peduzzi that they will
fish the next day once they have gotten some lead. The guide,
however, his "day ... going to pieces before his eyes,"
cannot let the matter go, repeating over and over that to fish
the young gentleman needs "piombo." As he makes
his point, he becomes overly familiar again, calling his client
"caro" and displacing the blame from himself:
"You said you had everything." The young gentleman doesn't
react but merely looks at the river, "discolored" by
the runoff, and humors Peduzzi. They will get some lead and fish
the next day, he tells the guide.
The sexual references here are hard to miss, and indeed many
who have commented on the story point to it.15 As a
symbol for the young man's ineffectuality, the lack of lead seems
perfectly appropriate, as do the phallic rods (DeFalco 167), which
the young gentleman joins and unjoins. In fact, as the story continues,
the sense of his weakness is heightened. Peduzzi wants to know
at what time the two will go fishing tomorrow, and his client
obligingly tells him that they will leave at seven. Relieved of
his fear of arrest -- the sun comes out to mark the change in
emotion -- the young man now takes out the marsala and passes
the bottle to the guide, who gives it back to his client untouched.
Surprisingly, after the young man takes a drink and passes the
wine back to Peduzzi, the guide returns the bottle again, even
though he has been urged to help himself. He has been "watching
it closely" (139), waiting for his client to have his fill.
After another short drink, the young man gives Peduzzi the bottle
again, and this time the guide takes it "very hurriedly"
and drains it. For him, too, the weather change seems appropriate:
he feels that it is "a great day," a "wonderful
day" again.
Flushed with drink, his eyes glistening, Peduzzi continues in
his overly familiar manner: "'Senta, caro!'
In the morning at seven." Thinking to himself that he has
now twice called his client "my dear" without being
upbraided, the guide sees his future as a series of days like
this one. As the two walk back to town, the young gentleman goes
on ahead up the hill. Realizing that his client is so far in front,
Peduzzi calls to him ("caro" again), asking for
five lire as a favor. When the young man wants to know if the
money is for their trip today, the guide tells him that he will
use the lire for the next day's provisions -- bread and salami
and cheese, minnows for bait, and perhaps even some marsala. The
young gentleman takes out his wallet but gives Peduzzi only four
lire, ironically the same amount he had earned digging up the
hotel garden (Jackson 16). Mellow sees in this gesture the young
man's attempt to restore his self-esteem (223); but, whatever
the case, the guide is effusively grateful, thanking his "caro"
once more "in the tone of one member of the Carleton Club
accepting the Morning Post from another." In his own
mind establishing himself on the same social level as the young
gentleman, Peduzzi sees his life "opening out"; he is
finished spading manure. Lost in his own inebriated reveries,
he boldly slaps his client on the back in great bonhomie and tells
the young man that they will meet "Promptly at seven."
The young gentleman, however, has a surprise for Peduzzi: "I
may not be going," he remarks. Stunned, the guide tells him
that he will have all the provisions ready for the three of them,
the Signora included -- minnows and salami, everything. But the
young man merely repeats himself, indicating that he will "very
probably not" be going after all. Then, most cowardly of
all, he tells the guide: "I will leave word with the padrone
at the hotel office." At this point, we are reminded of the
wife's earlier remark about "guts" as the story comes
to a close.
Whether the famous theory of omission was a post hoc creation
or whether it worked effectively in this story (almost certainly,
it did not) or whether the first and last paragraphs of the piece
are "Grade I" Hemingway or whether he really meant just
those two paragraphs as the story's beginning and ending -- these
and other issues have been adequately treated elsewhere.16
What is important here is that in this very early story Hemingway
began to write the kind of work that would make him a central
figure in our literary landscape. Depicting as it does the difficulty
of maintaining a relationship between a man and a woman, "Out
of Season," as a close reading shows, marks the debut of
the essential Hemingway.
Notes
1 Brief commentary on the story appears in Adair 341-46;
C. Baker, A Life Story 109, 111, 170-71, 509, 581; Selected
Letters 180-81; The Writer as Artist 15-16, 121-22,
409-10; S. Baker 18; Bakker 48, 50, 53; Beegel, Hemingway's
Craft 7, 12; Bruccoli 10; Capellan 72; DeFalco 154, 163-68;
Diliberto 41, 149-50, 153; Flora, Ernest Hemingway 30-33,
36, 116; Hemingway's Nick Adams 56-57n, 191, 213, 223n;
Giger 14, 91, 93; Grebstein 6, 156; Griffin 46-47; Grimes 48,
72, 135n92; Hemingway, A Moveable Feast 75; Hovey 10; Kert
135-36, 138; Lynn 201-04, 208, 252, 265, 363, 364; Mellow 222-24,
226, 228; Meyers 49, 124, 139, 141, 153, 154; Rao 30, 123, 163-64;
Reynolds 122; Sanderson 22-24; Smith, New Essays 3-6, 8,
12; A Reader's Guide 16-22; Stephens 365; Sutherland 45;
Wagner 58, 64; Waldhorn 11, 44-45, 70, 256n4; Williams 32, 33,
36, 106; Young 177, 178, 197, 284, 285n.
2 See also Stewart Sanderson, who points out that "it
is to 'Out of Season' that we must turn to see the direction that
his [Hemingway's] writing was to take, for this story is handled
quite differently from the earlier two ["Up in Michigan"
and "My Old Man"] and has all the characteristics of
vintage Hemingway" (22).
3 Kenneth Lynn notes that Peduzzi's name comes "from
one of the Italian soldier-servants who had waited on the American
ambulance drivers in Section Four at Schio" (202).
4 In the typescript and in Three Stories and Ten
Poems, Hemingway varies "young gentleman" with "y.g."
Ganzel notes that in fifteen instances the Boni and Liveright
editor expanded "y.g." for the story's appearance in
In Our Time and that this alteration and two other major
textual changes distorted Hemingway's intentions. See also DeFalco,
who believes that Hemingway's use of "young gentleman"
was "an ironic tag-name to represent the inner weaknesses
of the character" (164), and Smith, "Some Misconceptions,"
Endnote 13: "The abbreviation was a deliberate satiric device"
(251).
5 Paul Smith's reading of the story ("Some Misconceptions"
esp. 239-41) provides a thorough analysis of the various versions
of "Out of Season." See also Adair, Endnote 14 (498).
Bickford Sylvester believes that mysteriously and mysterious
are part of the story's connection to Eliot's The Waste Land
(85).
6 Jackson argues that the story's point of view fluctuates
between a focus on Peduzzi and a focus on the married couple.
Tracing the shifts, Jackson shows how much of the story is Peduzzi's,
as Hemingway claimed. In his article, Ganzel discusses what he
calls Hemingway's use of "a disjunctive point of view"
(see esp. 180 for a summary of how this technique works). Sutherland
argues that one of the story's flaws is Hemingway's failure to
locate the "central tension" either between the couple
or between Peduzzi and his dreams (45). Adair, however, believes
that the story is about Peduzzi (342).
7 See Lynn 175 and Mellow 181-82 as well. Mellow also
points to a possibly darker incident involving marsala in Hemingway's
life (224).
8 DeFalco sees the joke of the story in Hemingway's
play on geld: "Suggesting castration as well as money,
the pun appearing just after the Beerbohm reference further personifies
the type of individual the husband has become" (165).
9 Waldhorn notes that this is Hemingway's first use
of rotten as a "moral epithet" (44).
10 Admitting that the couple's problem is not ever
revealed (165), DeFalco believes that Tiny's comment about the
sweaters "suggests that the discord lies in the area of sexual
estrangement or incompatibility" (166).
11 Johnston also notes, following Baker (A Life
Story 595n), that McAlmon locates the genesis of "Hills
Like White Elephants" in a discussion about birth control
and abortion that Hemingway and others had in Rapallo in February
1923 shortly before "Out of Season" was written (45-46,
Endnote 11).
12 Bakker agrees: "The whole ambience of the story
subtly suggests the breaking-up of their marriage" (50).
13 Steinke sees the daughter's "little rejection"
as "both comic and pathetic" (68).
14 Sylvester discusses the muddy wine and river in
the context of his reading of Hemingway's use of the Fisher King
legend in the story (88).
15 See, for example, DeFalco 166-67; Johnston 44, 46
(Endnote 13); Mellow 223; Rao 163-64; and Sylvester 81-84. For
a different and more highly speculative reading of Hemingway's
use of lead, see Adair 344-45. See also Sylvester 88 for
yet another view of the significance of having no lead.
16 See, for example, Paul Smith's capacious "Some
Misconceptions" and the introduction to his very recent New
Essays on Hemingway's Short Fiction, esp. 3-6. See also Thomas
Strychacz' reading of the story as central to an understanding
of In Our Time: "The story suggests powerfully that
we may only understand our time as the communal loss of temporal,
geographical, and cultural certainties; and it focuses In Our
Time's often ironic and sometimes funny quests for adequate
guides, codes of conduct, and manly actions in a world where the
old, communal prayers seem to have lost their power" (55).
Works Cited
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Charles J. Nolan, Jr., a professor of English at the U.S. Naval
Academy, is the author of Aaron Burr and the American Literary
Imagination (1980) as well as a number of articles in such
journals as The Hemingway Review, Studies in Short Fiction,
The Mark Twain Journal, Resources for American Literary
Study, The Chaucer Review, and College Literature.
He has served at different times as both department chair and
as president of the Faculty Senate.
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