journal | miscellany | press | podcast | team

Preface to a Hemingway-Inspired Collection

Brady Harrison

Some months ago, and in a rush, I wrote a number of stories in conversation with the life and works of Ernest Hemingway. As part of what I thought might grow into a collection, I wrote a Preface describing the work. For lots of reasons—primarily, I’m working on a new novel—I set aside the collection, but here share the Preface as a celebration of the reading life.

I wrote these stories for fun.

Although Ernest Hemingway is not my favorite writer, and although he was, by many accounts, an unpleasant, even boorish person, reading The Sun Also Rises when I was in college changed my life.

The right book at the right time.

When I first read it, in that American Novel course long ago, I don’t suppose I really appreciated how dark it was, how awful Jake and his friends could be to one another and to anyone who had the misfortune to be drawn into their orbit, and even though I was a dedicated reader of history, especially the histories of World Wars I and II, I don’t think, at twenty and attending college in a safe, reasonably prosperous, albeit sometime bitterly cold city in central Alberta, that I appreciated just how traumatized many of the characters were. But what I did understand was that I definitely wanted to live in Paris and read books—and hopefully write a few decent ones—and I certainly grew up among people who enjoyed drinking and camping and almost any sort of outdoor adventure. My dad and my friends and I did a lot of hiking, spelunking, downhill skiing, target shooting, rock and fossil hunting, panning for gold, and we fished for rainbows and lake trout and Northern Pike. To a twenty year old, Jake and his friends seemed to be living adventurous, albeit dissolute and disastrous lives.

In those days, I was also reading Morley Callaghan’s early stories and novels and the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein and I number Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses among my all-time favorite books.

Later on, I would read John Dos Passos and Djuna Barnes, and because I was enthralled by the Modernists, I read Faulkner (a writer I admire a great deal more than Hemingway) and Pound and Eliot, and because Paris in the 1920s seemed dazzling, I thought Harlem in the 1920s also sounded brilliant, so I read Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Are Watching God has meant as much to me as The Sun Also Rises: what would it mean to write a sentence as good as “There are years that ask questions and years that answer”? What would it mean to write a book of such joy and such sorrow?). And if Paris and Harlem, then what about London? Hemingway wrote a brilliant novel—and then perhaps rewrote it twice more as A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls?—but do his major works really compare to the achievement of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, or The Waves?

If we’re talking the 1920s (and into the 1930s), we can’t forget Agatha Christie, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, D.H. Lawrence (I always preferred his stories to his novels; some of his poems are pretty great, too), and many more.

But back to Hemingway.

Having, rather late in life, given myself permission to try my hand at fiction (I had a day job that kept me busy), I had the good fortune to find a small press to publish my first collection of stories, The Term Between, and my first novel, A Journey to Al Ramel, and even as I am at work on a new novel, I found myself revisiting, for fun and with considerably more critical distance than I possessed in college, Hemingway and I found myself wondering, not for the first time, Whatever happened to the young woman in “Hills Like White Elephants”? Did she stay with that awful man, the American, or did she decide to keep the baby?

As a longtime fan of what some scholars call “conversation pieces” or, as Kurt Brown and Harold Schechter write, “poems that respond to earlier poems—that argue with, elaborate on, recast, poke fun at, or pay tribute to their inspirations,” I thought that I could write a story in conversation with “Hills Like White Elephants.” The most famous example of a conversation in poems must be the many rejoinders, across the centuries, to Christopher Marlow’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” ranging from Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” to Mick Jagger and Keith Richard’s “Live with Me,” but the tradition also exists in prose. As Laura Spence-Ash documents in her Ploughshares series, “Fiction Responding to Fiction,” Raymond Carver’s “The Train” revisits John Cheever’s “The Five-Forty-Eight,” Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Boy” pays homage to Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” and in an early collection, Marriages and Infidelities, Joyce Carol Oates (that most prolific of writers) responds to stories by Anton Chekov, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Henry David Thoreau and refers to her work as “re-imaginings.” The tradition also exists, of course, across genres: a few years ago, the Hogarth press contracted a number of major authors, including Margaret Atwood, Howard Jacobson, Anne Tyler, Jeanette Winterson, and others, to retell a Shakespeare play of their choice; Atwood recasts The Tempest and Winterson, in a fascinating treatment, The Winter’s Tale. Beyond these famous examples, the greatest re-imaginings in prose might well be Willam Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, which, for my money, runs circles around Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, a masterpiece of close reading, revision, and empathy as great as its source, Charlottle Brontë’s Jane Eyre. While I definitely would not place myself in the company of these giants, as a reader, I have always got a kick out of writers responding to works that they admire or perhaps want to take down a peg or two; the tradition includes lots of examples of writers taking the piss, trying to show who’s smarter, who has the better chops. In my case—no taking the piss here—in revisiting “Hills Like White Elephants,” I wanted to hew closely not only to the question of whatever happened to “Jig,” but also to the structure, language, and imagery of the original.

As I set out to write my reply, I had two rules: first, the story had to work on its own; that is, it had to be of sufficient interest that even if a reader did not know the Hemingway story, they would, hopefully, find it compelling and a story in its own right (you do not need, in other words, to know the originals to read the stories in this collection, but it helps); and, second, the story would not only be respectful—I did not want to write a parody, however tempting that can be sometimes—but it also would be, hopefully, a worthy writing back. The story had to engage the original in a serious and meaningful way; it had to, in some measure, complement and extend the concerns and narrative strategies of Hemingway’s classic.

Against the grain of my usual process, I wrote “The White Hills of the Ebro” in a couple of hours (and I wrote it in Florence, Italy, one afternoon when I needed a break from wandering that lovely city). I thought my story worked pretty well—though I leave that judgment to others—and over the course of the next few weeks, without meaning to, I saw the possibilities for a series of stories in conversation with, or connected to, the life and works of Ernest Hemingway. Over the course of a spring and summer (a furious pace by my standards), and while working on the new novel that opens with Montgomery’s army in Sicily in 1944, I wrote the book you now hold in hand.

So, what sorts of stories will you find here?

Like “The White Hills of the Ebro,” some of the stories engage directly (and respectfully) with one or more of Hemingway’s most famous works. Still others, such as “chapter 6” and “Hunter-Killer,” recall events in his once-celebrated life (are we not weary of macho antics and alcoholism?) and revision them as stories; others, such as “Scott” revisit or make up events in the lives of Hemingway’s acquaintances or family. One of the tales, “All Their Easy Graces & Other Stories,” imagines monologues, somewhat in the mode of Robert Browning and Edgar Lee Masters, by characters in The Sun Also Rises on the occasion of Jacob Barnes receiving a notable prize for his reporting on the Spanish Civil War. Finally, some of the stories do not connect explicitly to Hemingway’s writing or adventures, but I hope that these narratives will be of interest to readers; these stories are my stories, and Hemingway and his places and (sometime) friends and concerns serve as traces or ghostly presences.

Sadly, at least from my perspective, not all the stories I have written in conversation with Hemingway can be included in this collection. For example, a tale not included here, “An Untold Story,” picks up on “The Last Good Country,” an unfinished and relatively obscure (and to my mind, quite curious) Nick Adams story that was not published in Hemingway’s lifetime but that eventually found its way into the posthumous collection, The Nick Adams Stories. “The Last Good Country,” a work that even dedicated readers of Hemingway’s oeuvre might not know (it is also included in the Finca Vigía edition of The Complete Short Stories), tells of Nick’s flight, along with his younger sister, “Littless,” from two game wardens and a demonic boy (whom we never see) into the woods. The tale includes incestuous desires, disguises, and the unsettling of genders and my revision seeks to fill in an obvious gap: what happens when Nick and Littless finally encounter the mysterious, malevolent boy who has made a habit of stalking Nick while Nick poaches trout and game in the wilderness? In fact, I wrote two versions, the first, the more reasonable one, matches as much as possible the tone and diegesis of the original; the second, much more diabolical, might be described as a Hemingway-meets-Cormac-McCarthy revision, yet neither version will very likely see the light of day due to copyright issues. For the same reason, readers will not here find stories responding to any works not in the public domain.

In the end, I think of this collection as an homage, not just to Hemingway, but to all the writers I admire and re-read, often. (I find Shakespeare, Sterne, Poe, Dickens, Melville, the Brontës, Faulkner, Woolf, Hurston, Ellison, Borges, Watson, Davies, Morrison, Sebald, Erdrich, and many others to be more interesting and powerful; Hemingway did his thing, and did it very, very well, but like the Ramones, he perhaps stuck too closely to certain subjects and thematics and to a four-on-the-floor yet justifiably famous style.) Sometimes, a writer, story, or character sink their hooks into us so deeply that they become part of us—we readers—part of our lives. In whatever unquantifiable, unmeasurable ways, they help to shape how we understand our own lives and the lives of others. I would like to life a glass with Ishmael and feel poor-devilish and grow convivial upon tears and to say, “Give it up, Sub-Subs!”; I would like, too, to set sail with Jack and Stephen (and yet not to get vaporized by a cannonball or have to have my skull trepanned on a rolling deck at sea); I would like to wander the moors, wondering about madness and the limits of the self (albeit at a safe distance from Heathcliff and Catherine); although it would be none of my business, knowing what we know about Antoinette’s early life in the wide Sargasso Sea, could I say to Jane that maybe Rochester’s not the one?; I would like to know Anne (with an “e”) and to live in good company on P.E.I.; I would like to whisper to Hamlet that perhaps, just this once, things might not have to rush toward their inevitable, bloody conclusion?; I would like to talk with Janie about all the people and things that she loved (but avoid the hurricane and rabid dog, if I could); I wish that I could tell Lutie and Bub that all will be well, but it never will; though I’m pretty sure that I would not be welcome, I would like to know Fleur, Lulu, Gerry, Joe, Cappy, and the ghosts of their worlds; I would like to be in Oxford, long ago, and buy a pint for Burton and say, “today is not a day for melancholy—well, maybe just a little” and yet laugh, with wonder, about life; I would like to be with Dunstan and Liesl as they hear the story of Magnus’ life (and to learn, firsthand, who killed Boy Staunton); I would like to grow up with Kroetsch in central Alberta; I would like to take a turn tilting at windmills with the Don and Sancho; I would like to ask Sherlock, “Dude, how did you figure that out?”; I would like to wander with Uncle Walt and talk about America, orgasms, and those we love and all the people we see around us but will never know; I would like to be in Berlin with Christopher and Sally (and then not to be in Berlin), the Yorkshire Dales with James, Helen, Siegfried, Tristan, and all the beasts, on the Nile or at End House with Hercule, Chicago with Augie, in New Orleans with Ignatius (also at a judicious distance), in Dublin with Stephen, in Paris in 1926 (with my guard up), in Rome and on the Amalfi coast, but not with Ripley, on board Rama, or with Paul Berlin chasing dumb as a month-old oyster fart Cacciato all the way to Paree; I would like to live on a houseboat on the Thames at Battersea and I would like to wander the shores of the lake near Fingerbone and imagine a different sort of life. And more, much, much more. If you’re very lucky in life, you have the opportunity to read, to become, for a time, part of worlds and lives that are not your own, to see life through the eyes and experiences of others, to get outside of your own skin and perhaps to know, if only a little, what it means to be alive, for the merest moment, on a tiny planet orbiting a modest star in an inconceivably vast cosmos. It’s been a reader’s life for me, and I am deeply grateful to all the story-tellers who have added riches to my life. I cannot imagine life without stacks and stacks and stacks of books and scores of adventures, conflicts, truths, companions and friends, and more.

In fact, I might visit my favorite bookstores this afternoon.

See you there.

▪ ▪ ▪

Brady Harrison‘s books include the novel A Journey to Al Ramel (finalist for the Big Other Book Award) and the story collection The Term Between (High Plains Book Award). His stories and critical articles have been published widely. He co-hosts the monthly podcast A Lesson before Writing.

journal | team | miscellany | podcast | home