Ernest Hemingway and Nick Adams: One in the Same

Harris Gruman Senior Research Pollock 4/28/16 Ernest Hemingway and Nick Adams: One in the Same Ernest Hemingway is a legend when it comes to 20th century literature. He wrote fiction in a manner that feels very real, creating an immersive experience for the reader. Born in Cicero, Illinois in 1899, he was raised by Clarence and Grace Hemingway in the suburbs. Society during this time was beginning to respect women more, and his mother Grace refused to play the subservient role. She was a rather harsh and intimidating figure in the Hemingway household, even threatening Ernest and his father at times (Ernest Hemingway: A Biography 15). Grace often humiliated Clarence in public and frequently made her husband tend to the cooking and household chores. His father spent the remainder of his life in depression and later committed suicide. Ernest blames his mother for this. This was one the earliest traumatic experiences Ernest went through in his life and the first of many that shaped his writing. When reading the Nick Adams stories, many include Nick’s father teaching him outdoor skills and other normal father and son activities. Very few of these short stories include a motherly figure in Nick’s life and this may be due to some of the experiences Ernest went through with his own mother. The Nick Adams stories are very revealing and show us how Hemingway viewed both himself and the world. Nick Adams is Hemingway as a fictitious character, and through this character we see underlying themes of masculinity and violence. As a young man, Hemingway was known for being very competitive in everything he did (Hemingway 16). Hemingway was a prize fighter and a very keen boxer. He picked many fights with kids in his school and even took on a whole gang of them by himself before his parents realized he had an aggression problem. The determination he had in facing fear and pain is expressed in his “code of the hero” we learn in his later writing. Hemingway was not interested in girls at this point in his life, and spent much of his time writing. He did not date and seemed to avoid girls. This could be one of the reasons he often did not include many women in his stories and was criticized later in his life for being sexist. In 1917 after he graduated high school he received a job at the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. Ernest only spent a few months working there and once the Italian Red Cross officials arrived, he was very eager to sign up. In 1918 Hemingway was commissioned as a second lieutenant to fight in World War One and stationed at a post in Milan, Italy. He was finally free of family restraints and excited to serve his country. Shortly after he got there a munitions factory exploded and Hemingway’s group was one of the first dispatched to help. It was a brutal scene to witness with bodies and their scattered parts, including flesh caught in the barbed wire fence surrounding the building. Years later he wrote about this traumatic scene in his story Death in the Afternoon. Fighting then shifted south where Hemingway volunteered to man a relief station behind the lines at Fossalta di Piave. He was not very busy here and his duties consisted of him bringing chocolates and cigarettes to the Italian soldiers at the front. Once again in the middle of one unfortunate night on July 8, Hemingway was delivering supplies near the front lines when he was hit with shrapnel from a trench mortar shell. As a result he was severely wounded in the head and both legs in a heroic attempt to save an Italian soldier. Hemingway was celebrated as the first American casualty of war and received a great deal of press in the States. Shortly after he was transported to a field hospital in Milan just a few days before his nineteenth birthday. This hospital is where he met his first crush, twenty-six-year-old Agnes von Kurowsky, a librarian from Washington D.C. After spending a couple more months healing from his wounds, he finally returned home to the states as a war hero. The war did not treat Earnest well but it led the way for him to start his writing career. These experiences provided him with many short stories that we see in the Nick Adams Stories. In Our Time, Men Without Women, and The Nick Adams Stories are the three main works by Hemingway that use the character Nick Adams. The Nick Adams Stories is a compilation of most of the stories written about Nick’s early life into one chronological piece. It starts off with Nick’s boyhood in Michigan and continues up until he goes off to World War One. Many of these stories are written as a way for Hemingway to remember himself as a young man. Men Without Women is different than the other works because rather than Nicks stories continuing in Chronological order, they actually go backwards. This work starts with Nick serving in the war while commissioned in Italy. Next it moves on to when he is an adolescent Illinois and finishes with him as a young boy in Michigan. Finally, In Our Time, one of the most famous of his works and the first to be officially published on October 5, 1925, is a collection of stories written chronologically following Nicks time in the war and the changes he had to make returning home after war. These are about him overcoming anxiety from the wars and learning to live normally in society once again. This work is more than just a collection of stories but also sketches reflecting experiences at the core of Hemingway’s writing and foreshadows many of the themes and techniques of his writing. In Our Time is not only just the first of his major works but also the best introduction to his thought and art. Before the sixteen stories in this work were published together in one volume, many were just short stories featured in newspapers across the country. Two of the stories were published in Paris in 1924 and the other fourteen were written earlier. The title In Our Time suggested a common theme in all of the stories. This book title came from a book known as the Book of Common Prayer: “Give Peace in our time, O Lord.” The title defines a world and human condition in which there is very little peace of any kind. (Hemingway 29) Hemingway intended for In Our Time to be more than a casually linked anthology. The book is arranged in three parts: Nick’s time in war, bullfighting in Spain, and starting his career in journalism. He surrounded bullfighting with war and crime and places violence and death on which man imposes meaning and order. Meaning is at the center of a world of chaotic disorder and violence, implying that from bullfighting Nick’s character learns something about the world and how to live in it. It starts with Nick’s youth, innocence, and peace. He exposes the basic realities of the world and the human condition. This work is the most important of the Nick’s books because it is about his most important theme: Man must face up to the world and human condition as they really are and then cope with the problem of living as a human being in such a harsh world. The Nicks Adams Stories are known as coming of age stories and show how the past has shaped Hemingway’s life/outlook. Some of the earliest experiences Nick goes through involves Indians in the heart of Adams country (Michigan). Hemingway talks a lot about happiness and emotions in many of his stories and ways in which the characters find it. Nick runs away from home to join the war in Europe and returns home to find peace and satisfaction living in the woods surrounded by nothing but nature and this helps him recover from the horrors of the war. Hemingway believed that the good in human life is found in nature and in nature the cycle of birth and death occurs. He includes the constant presence of Nature in the forms of beautiful landscapes and wholesome surroundings. Nature is one of the only themes Hemingway writes about in a positive fashion. Hemingway was an outdoorsman who hunted, fished, camped, and boated. He believed overcoming natural obstacles using your intelligence made you a better person. His characters look to majestic landscapes for hope, inspiration, and guidance during tough times and challenging times. Nick is seen in many of the short stories outside traveling by following train tracks until he reaches his destination. Cars were not usually a means for transportation back then, especially when Nick was a young man. He traveled around the Northeast always by foot or occasionally hitching a ride on a train. Travelling was not easy, especially when it took as long as it did for him to get to most of his destinations. He spent so many nights in the woods building camp fires and hunting just to make it through the cold nights. The ability for him to survive countless nights hungry and cold is a test of his masculinity. Nature taught Nick so many important qualities and skills that he will later bring with him to war and help him survive in a completely different environment. Hemingway loved the notion of masculinity and how it shaped him and so many of his characters. Typically his heroes were outdoorsmen or hunters who were stoic and were opposed to the feelings of emotion. The “Real Men” in his stories are physically courageous and confident, keeping their doubts and negative thoughts to themselves in order for them not to appear weak. (Hemingway 35) Manhood is never granted in his stories but rather proved or earned. In the story “The Killers” Nick’s masculinity is shown when he defies two hit men to warn the target before they reach him. In “Fathers and Sons” Nick’s coming of age is shown when he is taught how to hunt black squirrels. He learns early on by his father how to hunt and these skills he will later use for the rest of his life when he is alone and hungry in nature. There are three stories in particular that I feel are very relevant when learning about Hemingway’s upbringing and his development. In the following paragraph, my goal is to outline and analyze the correlations between Hemingway and Nick Adams. Reading Nick Adams is a great way to learn very personal things about Hemingway. Some of Nick Adams delves into topics that are raunchy or even taboo. Some of the things discussed in these stories would not be spoken about openly due to their crude or graphic content, especially in that era. The Battler is one of my favorite Nick Adams stories written by Hemingway. This is one of the first of many coming of age stories for Nick where he learns to be tough and stop for nothing until he reaches his destination. It starts off with Nick fairly battered and walking along a set off train tracks watching the train disappear off into the distance. An apparently friendly brakeman working on the train lured him over for nothing but a solid punch to the face. The man said to him “come here kid, I got something for you.” (In Our Time 27) Nick is upset at this man and with himself for falling for such foolishness and now rather hitching a ride on this train he is thrown off the side. It is dark outside and he has no other choice but to follow the tracks until he gets closer to his original destination, Mancelona. He must only be a few miles away by now when he sees a fire close by and heads towards it. A man is sitting next to the fire and Nick greets him with a hello. They talk about how he got his black eye and the man says he saw the brakes man running along the tops of the train cars flailing his arms and screaming like a fool, so he must have been intoxicated. The man introduces himself as Adolph Francis. Nick recognizes the name immediately because this man was once a famous boxer but now is a punch drunk bum recently out of jail for hitting people. He didn’t recognize him because his face was so mutilated and he was missing one ear. Ad tells him about his career and how he was able to win so many fights because of how low his heart rate was, beating only forty a minute and also warns Nick that he was not mentally stable but Nick couldn’t tell due to how nice he was to him. Adolf’s career had been destroyed when he married his manager who was a woman that looked so much like his sister that the public humiliated him because “for marrying a sibling.” He also tells Nick how tough a kid he was and any problems he has in the future can easily be overcome. Ad offers him food and Nick gladly accepts. The man has a Negro named Bugs who cares for him with sympathy and understanding and they met while in jail. Bugs comes out of the woods and starts preparing the meal which would be ham and egg sandwiches. Nick is helping prepare by slicing bread using a knife that Ad handed him. They all start eating and Nick offers the knife back to him when bugs warned him not to. All of a sudden the Ad snaps and starts threatening Nick. He say to him “how the hell did you get that way” and “who the hell do you think you are.” (In Our Time 29) The man keeps going off calling Nick a snotty bastard and that he was an unappreciative little shit. He then tells Nick to hit him multiple times and when all is about to get bad Bugs slugs him across the head to knock him out. (In Our Time 29). Bugs was very kind to Nick and apologizes to him about the way Ad behaved. He told him that Ad was in fact a little crazy and when he snaps like that to people the best thing to do is smack him on the back of the head and knock him out because when he wakes up he forgets anything that just happened. The two continue eating and talking about Ad. Bugs said it was all of the head trauma due to the fighting over the years and an incident with the man’s wife whom the public believed to be his actual sister. Due to all the scrutiny he received by so many people and his wife eventually passing this did him in and took away much of his sanity. Bugs offers Nick coffee and tells him he should get going before Ad wakes up. Nick thanks him for everything, Bugs wishes him good luck with his travels and Nick departs. This is an important experience for Nick because it was a continuation of his rite of passage into manhood. Growing up in his hometown Nick has always been in the same place and circles back into the same state of mind he has always been stuck in. In The Battler Nick takes a journey that ends up being a reflection of his internal development being on an adventure by himself and running into trouble but through all of this he learns how to deal with these types of situations. In this story after the trouble happens on the train, he meets people who can teach him something. Adolph Francis teaches Nick that he is tough just like he feels like he should be. Toughness is part of Nick’s manhood that he is quickly trying to gain. The second lesson was craziness clearly witnessed by seeing Ad flip the switch on him in just a matter of seconds. The craziness comes from a women and Ad is therefore acting as a warning to him not to get close to any women. If he gets to close he could end up like Ad being crazy in love and dependent on money from her. The journey Nick was on in this story was him heading back to try to get Marjorie his ex-back. Now leaving Ad Francis he is dealing with a tough decision whether or not to pursue her again. This leaves him with deciding to accept the toughness and aloofness from women, which his father also tried to teach him earlier in his life. Nick leaves the scene with a very important lesson learned: the world is a confused and treacherous place, but not without love and compassion. Hemingway wrote this story to portray one of his own journeys to find love. He did ride that train and ended thrown off, forced to walk miles in the thick and cold forest. On his way to find his soon to be ex-girlfriend Martha, he ran into a man in the woods that fed him and gave him food to make it through the night. Although in real life he didn’t run into an old boxer in the story Nick is meant to learn many more experiences than just not giving up on love. Another one of my favorites and very important to Nick’s life is Indian Camp. Another one of my favorites that involved Nick is called “Indian Camp” and is seen in both The Nick Adams Stories and In Our Time. This one of the first stories featuring Nick’s character that saw print. It was written when Hemingway was still in high school and is considered one of his deepest stories. The story starts off as a camping trip with Nick, his father’s doctor Henry Adams, and his uncle George. While the adults were off fishing Nick was by himself in the tent attempting to sleep. His father gave him a gun and told him to shoot three times if he was in trouble. Not long after they left Nick heard some noises in the bushes around him that frightened him. It was night time but it wasn’t the dark that frightened him, instead it was the thought of dying. He shoots the gun three times and soon enough his father and uncle come back to find him sleeping. Nothing was actually wrong and his uncle was rather upset. At the start of the Indian camp story, it begins when the three set off in a row boat lead by Indians to a camp where his father was going to help assist a woman who was trying to give birth. All The doctor brought with him was a knife, with no medication or anesthetic for the pregnant women. He performed a C-section and after much screaming from the women, the baby is finally born. After this whole ordeal the women is sewn up and unconscious. They look over at the husband to congratulate him on his newborn child but he had slit his throat from ear to ear. They leave and it ends with Nick asking his father if dying was hard. (In Our Time 15). This is very similar to how Ernest’s father took his life in reality. His father was a very overwhelmed man who found it hard to cope with some of the harsh aspects of life. Suicide is a common theme for Hemingway and is scattered throughout his stories. This story is important to the Nick Adams series because it is perhaps the most violent and lays down the basis of what becomes the basic pattern to Hemingway’s fiction. It exposes the character to violence, psychological shock, and then focusing on the consequences. His father regrets taking Nick along to witness that horrible sight. Nick asks him why the man killed himself and he tells him that the man must not have been able to take the pain of hearing and watching his wife like that. He then asks again if dying is hard and if many men and women kill themselves and his father asks him to stop. It is silent the rest of the way home and Nick thinks to himself that he was not ever going to die. (In Our Time 17). This story brings up the theme of masculinity where Hemingway turns a female act into a male dominated situation. The story seems like it is about childbirth but it is really about the experience of his father being the doctor than the women. Rather than natural childbirth the baby was brought into the world by a C-section where it is cut of the women instead of being pushed out. In this male dominated atmosphere the suicide of the Indian father was an act of femininity because he killed himself because he could not take the pain. Nick’s father was upset he brought him along because he witnessed what the man could not stand due to lack of courage. It also brings up the major theme of suicide, which the Hemingway’s clearly thought about often. The ideal males in this story are Nick’s father and Uncle George. They examine the dead fathers body without hesitation and were more amazed at the situation than disturbed. This teaches Nick to accept what happens with no complaining and show no emotion. His father gives Nick little or no answers during the ride home and treats the incident with silence. This is the start of silent masculinity that starts appearing throughout the stories. Nick also discovers that nature is not always beautiful and orderly in her process or concerned at all with human suffering. Disturbed by the screams of the women in labor, he learns from his father that babies don’t always come out head first like they should. They found the woman’s husband lying in his own pool of blood after he slit his throat with a razor blade because he could not “stand things.” (In our time 20) The man’s death was a result of the woman’s suffering due to the fact that he could not do anything to help his wife but the doctor’s professionalism was the only way to relieve her pain. Nicks father says “her screams are not important; I don’t hear them because they are not important.” (21) This scene gives Nick an idea about the relationship between birth and death and violence and suffering. After going home and seeing the sun rise Nick feels as if he will never die but this feeling rises from its own denial. The last of my three favorite short stories is called The Killers. One winter evening in Chicago, Nick is sitting at the end of a counter in a dinner his friend George is the manager of. Nick watches as two over-dressed strangers named Al and Max walk in. immediately they complain about the serving schedule, order dinner and joke about Nick and George being dumb country boys. After finishing the meal Al orders Nick, Sam, and the black cook into the kitchen where he proceeds to tie them up. Meanwhile the two men tell the boys that they were sent there to kill an aging boxer named Ole Anderson who is known to eat there every day at 6 P.M. The boxer fails to show up and the two men finally leave. George unties Nick and Sam and tells Nick he should go warn the boxer, which he did immediately. Nicks tells Ole about the two men and he didn’t even seem bothered by it because apparently he knew and was waiting for this day for some time. He tells Nick he is sick of running and thanks him for coming to warn him. Nick leaves and heads back to the diner where he then tells George he is leaving town because he can’t bear to think about a man just waiting to be killed by hired killers. Hemingway wrote this story in the 1920’s during the time of prohibition when he was living in Chicago. In cities like this, mobsters bribed public officials, extorted money from businessmen, operated brothels, and made vast sums from bootleg liquor after enactment of the prohibition of alcohol. Hemingway was living first hand around all of this and while working for the newspaper was well informed about all of this chaos going on because they reported it. The influence for the story came when he witnessed two mobsters with guns ordering two people out of the restaurant he was in. “The Killers” is not a real life tale that actually happened to him but it was meant to explain and show that gangsters were running the city at the time. In the story Nick is the one tied up and nearly killed and is forced under control of the two gangsters. In The Killers we never learn why Ole was to be killed because all he told Nick was “he got in the wrong.” The main concern with the story is Nick’s exposure to evil and how he reacts to it. This is one of Nick’s first experiences with evil and it was hard for him to understand men who killed for no reason rather than to just kill. Nick feels he must be responsible in warning the boxer of the danger but he left very confused. He learned from this experience that the world is not always what it seems to be. Nick and many of Hemingway’s other characters have ambivalent feeling towards each other. In Fathers and Sons Nick recalls all of his dad’s qualities that he considered admirable. Hemingway always admired his father’s ability to see like an eagle and his breadth knowledge of regarding hunting and fishing. Not all memories were as good as those and the rest of them consisted of ignorance and cruelty. (In Our Time 43) This story is devoted to the memories of his father, which were mostly painful but he insists that he loves him and only tries to think of the positive experiences, where his father taught him lessons that would help him survive in the future. Nick’s father is one of the main reasons Nick is who he is, and taught him many survival techniques that he uses so many times throughout his life. Hemingway writes of a world that is typically violent. In the world of The Sun Also Rises there is hard drinking and sexually promiscuousness. Farwell to Arms is the chaotic and brutal world of war. Even if one of his stories doesn’t fall into one of these categories it still usually involves some kind of desperate risk either physically or spiritually. All of his characters including Nick are tough men or eventually grow up to be tough through the hard worlds in which they inhabit. Emotions and sensitivity in these characters is lacking due to a violent and harsh upbringing. Hemingway has a code that he applies to all of his male characters in each of his stories. Robert Warren author of Introduction to A Farwell to Arms states, “Hemingway writes of a violent world, where his heroes are men who live by a code of honor. This code, and the discipline needed to follow it, gives meaning to life. This code helps Hemingway’s heroes face the nothingness of death.” The typical character always faces either defeat or death but out of the two they usually manage to gain some type of lesson learned or new skill gained from that experience. Through reading Hemingway’s stories you can immediately understand his special interest in these situations the characters go through. His heroes are never defeated unless it is own their own terms. Never do his characters take the cowardly way out or compromise. When confronted with defeat, a hero is decisive, either fight until they cannot anymore or simply accept that the fight is over. If confronted with defeat the character always has an idea of how one should act or behave in the situation. When defeated a hero always leaves with some notion of honor rather squandering their dignity. Hemingway believed the discipline of the code helped his characters resonate the audience, appearing more authentic. This discipline applies to all of characters in every type of story he has written whether it is a soldier, sportsman, athlete, or artist. Following the code gives humans order and allows them to achieve moral significance. The typical hero in Hemingway’s stories is aware of death or the process of death. When his characters understand death, it becomes much easier for them to stick to the code. Nick experiences two wounds that are very significant in understanding Hemingway’s life. The first wound is Nick growing up in the American Midwest, and having a sense that he is unimportant. The wound grows as Nick is injured in the war physically and psychologically. The second wound is post war when Nick is taking a long break from society focusing mainly on himself. Big Two Hearted River is the story of Nick still not understood. It is the story of a young man hurt by war on a fishing trip with no one, escaping everyone in the world surrounding him. He is suffering from shell shock and is desperately trying not to lose his mind. Nick is simply trying to live and fit into a society he feels so distant from. He suffers from insomnia and has trouble falling asleep at night. Nick is an outdoorsman who is honest, sensitive, and has a lot of nerve. Nicks dies metaphorically many times before his actual death. (In Our Time 62) Although he learns how to live with his troubles, how to overcome others, he never completely recovers from his wounds as long as Hemingway was alive to write. Nick is known as a hero because he represents the code to which true heroes live by. Nick lives properly in the world of violence, disorder, and misery in which he has been introduced to and surrounded by his entire life. Hemingway’s typical “code hero” exemplifies honor, courage, and endurance. He lives in a life of tension and pain that makes him a man and enables him to conduct himself well in losing the battle of life. Hemingway’s world is violent and his characters tend to live in the same type of world. In this distorted reality there are no descriptions of anything pleasant, things tend to explode, break, decompose, or are eaten away (Readings on Ernest Hemingway 45). This world is saved from total misery when his characters show competence, courage, and the happiness your body can give you when it’s not in pain. Like ordinary characters in movies and books, Hemingway’s don’t mature or become adults. He makes it impossible to see them in family circles, voting or doing their tax returns. “His world is a narrow world that can only be seen through a crack by a man pinned down by gunfire.” (45) His vision insisted that people understand the violence of the era and that it is seen on a daily basis around the world. His bleak outlook is apparent and is often depressing for the reader. Reading Nick Adams allows the reader to gain immense insight into Hemingway’s dismal attitude and what inspires his writing. The key to understanding Hemingway is through his “hero” style of writing. Nick Adams is the character that fits so closely with his definition of hero. His early stories show a boy who is psychologically wounded while growing up due to family issues just like Hemingway himself. Then we see Nick growing up and wounded again physically and emotionally during the times of war as a young man. Hurt in war, Nick becomes shell shocked or what is now considered to be post-traumatic stress disorder. After the war and continuing on in life he becomes a very sensitive individual, and never fully recovers from the wounds of war. Following Hemingway’s code, Nick lives the rest of his life properly, conducting himself well in in the losing battle of life. Hemingway used Nick Adams as an autobiographical fictitious character, drawing parallels with his own life in almost every story. Nick Adams experiences many events and struggles with the feelings of insecurity that Hemingway dealt with. Hemingway used Adams as a vehicle for displaying his less manly qualities such as insecurity and anxiety. Hemingway is very troubled by his past and often copes in strange ways, by reading the Nick Adams stories we gain insight as to how he dealt with such a harsh reality. Works Cited Hemingway, Ernest. In our time. Simon and Schuster, 2014. Hemingway, Ernest. Nick Adams Stories. Simon and Schuster, 2014. DeFalco, Joseph. The hero in Hemingway's short stories. Norwood Editions, 1979. Hemingway, Ernest. Men without women. Simon and Schuster, 1997. Hemingway, Ernest. The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Simon and Schuster, 2002. Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway: a reconsideration. Penn State Press, 2010. MEYERS, JEFFREY. "Ernest Becoming Hemingway." 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