Your thoughts on this? HILLS LIKE WHITE ELEPHANTS. This is an apolitical zone. This story was written in 1927, just about when Hem was marrying Pauline (May 1927). He converted to Catholicism as Pauline was devout. It is clear that Hemingway’s sympathies are with the woman. While criticized for not writing women well, i disagree and think he depicts this young woman’s uncertainty and fear well. And just writing about abortion in 1927 while the word is never mentioned, is astonishing. Comments welcome! Best, Christine

Weekend Short: Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’

Ernest Hemingway sitting at a table writing while at his campsite in Kenya, circa 1953.(Public Domain/via Wikimedia)

April 15, 2023 9:57 AM

Author’s note: “Weekend Short” is a weekly profile of a short story. Additional analysis by the readership is encouraged in the comments section.

Welcome to the weekend!

The creatures of the yard are engaged in harum-scarum antics on a warm and sun-soaked morning here in central Wisconsin.

Today’s short is Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” originally published in 1927. Set in Spain, the story portrays a couple as they struggle to make conversation around an inconvenience — an unmentioned something related to the woman. In his characteristic style, Hemingway employs script-like sparsity, as if even the narrator is uncomfortable saying too much.

Hemingway writes:

The hills across the valley of the Ebro’ were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.

“What should we drink?” the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.

“It’s pretty hot,” the man said.

“Let’s drink beer.”

“Dos cervezas,” the man said into the curtain.

“Big ones?” a woman asked from the doorway.

“Yes. Two big ones.”

The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glasses on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.

“They look like white elephants,” she said.

“I’ve never seen one,” the man drank his beer.

“No, you wouldn’t have.”

“I might have,” the man said. “Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.”

You can read the rest here.

The man in the story wishes the woman to have an abortion. The woman is uncomfortable about the idea but defers to the man. The man, trying to preserve his outward honor while still achieving an immoral end, uses a romanticized past to convince the woman that all will be well after the “operation.”Pauline Pfeffer

The woman, playing for time and not wanting to discuss the decision, remarks that the hills “look like white elephants.” We can take that line to mean: that there’s “an elephant in the room,” that her “white elephant” is an undesired gift, or that she is unmoored and reverting to childish fictions. From the man’s response to her skepticism regarding his seeing elephants in the flesh, we can understand him to be a petty, disagreeable sort — a small man in the land of imagined pachyderms.

The man’s eventual movement from the table brings us back into the wash of humanity, as he moves through others awaiting the train — musings of destruction in the everyday. Upon his return, the woman appears to have accepted the prospect of abortion. An ugly story, but a masterful recreation of life’s many unuttered subjects which we elide in debate and through distraction.

Many thanks to Michael I. and Eric R. for suggesting Hemingway’s “Elephants.”

Author’s note: If there’s a short story you’d like to see discussed in the coming weeks, please send your suggestion to label@nationalreview.com.

The Short Story: Why we love them. C

The Glorious Intensity of a Great Short Story

DESIGN & LIVING COLUMN

“They mightn’t sell as much as a blockbuster novel, but our desire for an extraordinary short story that takes you to dark places prevails,” writes Ana Kinsella in her latest books column

JULY 05, 2019TEXTAna Kinsella

It may be hard to believe, but back in the 1920s, short fiction was big business. For the likes of F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, cranking out a few short stories to sell to magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, with their massive circulation figures, meant enough money to drown yourself in the finest martinis New York could offer. Today, 100 years later, the publishing industry looks a little different. When was the last time you paid for some written content on the internet, by the way? The $4,000 fee that Fitzgerald received (and bear in mind that’s 1920s money; think around £200,000 when adjusted for inflation) can only be dreamed of by authors today. But the peculiar thing is that there’s still something of a market out there, albeit one that has changed considerably.

Fitz and Hem: They could write short stories that you never forgot

Take Cat Person. Towards the end of 2017, a dark political year by anyone’s standards, the New Yorker published Kristen Roupenian’s short story and inadvertently triggered a tornado of hot takes on Twitter. Cat Person, though I probably don’t need to tell you this, latched onto some part of our collective imagination, some part shared by all the women who’d gone on bad dates with gross men and who’d looked for greater meaning in the ghosting that followed. It not only demonstrated the power of a well-written short story, but also our appetite for the format. In today’s climate of snackable content and videos that cut off after 15 seconds, it might be that a short story is just the palate cleanser we need most.

But what makes a well-written short story? For readers, they need to be tight and taut, packed with only the most necessary elements to draw us in and keep us involved over the course of a handful of pages. One perfect example is Raymond Carver, the American writer whose 1970s and 1980s stories demonstrated the value of saying less. There’s no room in a short story for fuss or frills; in a 500-page novel, on the other hand, there can be plenty of opportunity to digress. A good short story feels like a tightrope act, and by the time it ends, you can feel all the emotions of a blockbuster novel, but delivered a single smooth punch that knocks you to the ground and leaves you seeing stars.

This is not to say that writing a novel is by comparison an easy feat. But dip into one of Lydia Davis’s breathtakingly lucid short stories (start with Break It Down) and tell me that there isn’t something totally unique about the heft that a mere 20 or so pages can carry, when done properly. Knowing what to condense into so little space, and bringing the reader on an emotional journey along the way, is a challenge not suited to every writer.

So all that said, why would anyone bother writing them? It’s all in the arc, as Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure and award-winning short story writer, tried to explain it to me. “Short stories are inherently more playful I think,” she mused. “I try and see them as an opportunity to take a risk every time in some way, because if it doesn’t work out you can just go and write another one. You can go really deep into a moment in the way that a novel can’t always, and the shorter, sharper arc of a truly great story can be just completely disorienting, intense in a way I think you can’t sustain over a whole book.”

Reading the likes of Tenth of December by George Saunders or Especially Heinous by Carmen Maria Machado reveals the shocking fervour a well-wrought story can have. “Because you can read stories in one sitting, it’s a form perfectly suited for high-intensity experiences,” explains Thomas Morris, author of the short story collection We Don’t Know What We’re Doing. “When I finish reading a great story, I feel as if I’ve come away changed. And it’s incredible to me that I can have this kind of experience in the time between waking up and having my breakfast.” According to Thomas, the main difficulty when writing a short story is “knowing when to get in and when to get out. They’re like burglaries in that regard. Sometimes you need to linger, and keep searching for the treasure. Other times, it requires a smash and grab job.”

They mightn’t sell as much as a blockbuster novel, but as Cat Person itself proves, our desire for an extraordinary short story that takes you to dark places prevails. The perfect short story might not exist, but the very best can feel close to ideal exemplars of what can be done with words in such a short space. Lingering in the mind, like a microcosm of relationships or heartaches or middle-of-the-night fears, the power of the short story might be found in its willingness to dive right in and explore the murky depths that lie within us.

WAS LOSING THE VALISE GOOD OR BAD OR . . . SOMETHING ELSE?

In 1922, Hadley did the only thing that Hemingway has ever seriously criticized her for: She lost the valise that had his early manuscripts. Hadley was heading out on a train at the Gare de Lyon Paris railway station to meet Hemingway for vacation of skiing. She filled a valise with his early manuscripts, parts of short stories and all notes that she could find, in the belief that he could work on them while they were away.

When she got off of the train, she realized that she didn’t have the valise. To say that she was horrified doesn’t begin to describe how she felt. Hem found her in tears, totally inconsolable, and while on the surface he took it better than anyone ever could have thought he would, it’s the one thing that rankled for just about forever.

He was more than jolly on the holiday but was devastated when talking to his writer friends. Hemingway went back to Paris immediately and a reward was offered for the manuscripts return but they never were found. The early works would have given great insight into the development and evolution of Hemingway’s writing style.

All that was salvaged was an early version of Up in Michigan and My Old Man, some sketches, and some notes for short stories. What were lost were 11 stories and 20 poems that Hemingway wrote between 1921 and 1922. Ezra Pound suggested that since Hem knew what he was writing about, he should be able to recreate the stories in a better way. However, as most writers believe, your first efforts capture the raw power of your intent and then it’s refined. I know from my own writing that it’s rare that I can recreate the vision of the first draft, even if the first draft is not very good.

Hem tried to be cheerful despite this catastrophe but he did not write on the trip and it’s likely due to the incessant pain of this loss of his works. A publisher however wanted to publish My Old Man and he did begin to write after that. The shocking Up In Michigan was always a tough sell, particularly in the twenties, and his parents found it almost too upsetting to read. His mother’s criticism of it for its sexual themes was especially biting when Hen sought her approval despite his disdain for her.

Some critics and Hemingway scholars believe that since the first drafts were Hemingway’s first efforts at the economy of style that he developed over time, his use of simple language, the idea of leaving out as much as you put in, the loss may have benefited him by letting him begin afresh with the knowledge he’d learned. That’s putting a kind spin on it all. There is no way the loss was good but it was not, perhaps, devastating. Since Hemingway went on to have a career that’s unparalleled in literary history, it wasn’t crippling.

Those who knew Hemingway said he mentioned this incident often in later years. In early years he didn’t talk about it and preferred that no one else talk about it. It was just that painful. The incident was discussed in A Moveable Feast. Hemingway’s sister and some of his friends believe that this event was the beginning of the breakup of the marriage and that Hem never forgave Hadley. As cantankerous as Hemingway could be, I think he did forgive her since in essence A Movable Feast is a love poem to her and their life in Paris in the 1920s.

Hem in Rapallo or The Cat in the Rain

Plaque at Hotel Riviera, Rapallo — The Cat in the Rain writing place

Please forgive this reprint from 2012. I re-read it and felt it was worthy of a second look. I added some new media. Thank you all! Best, Christine

I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back I can feel… I want to have a kitty… I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles.

The Cat In The Rain, Ernest Hemingway

I never take vacations. Seriously, never. (I do now! Didn’t then. C) But last Spring, I decided, when nursing my lame broken clavicle from a fall off my horse, that I needed to see Italy soon, before something else broke and I wasn’t able to stroll up all those hills to all those hill towns.

I’ve avoided Tuscany for years because I found it repetitive to hear everyone talking about Tuscany, like they’d single-handedly discovered the place. But I succumbed when I saw a photo of the skyline of San Gimignano. It was romantic and lovely. I booked the trip

So I was strolling in Rapallo, after the Tuscan portion of the trip, and what do I see but a sign, about one third obscured by shrubbery proclaiming that this was the hotel in which Hemingway wrote The Cat in the Rain. I hadn’t gone looking for it—although I should have—but there it was. When I read the note displayed proudly in front of the hotel, I envisioned Hem and Hadley seeing that view, just as I was seeing it.

The days I was there were all gorgeous, sunny and warm with sparkling deep blue water. The day Hem wrote about was dank, gloomy, and stormy

I then had to run out to reread The Cat in the Rain, a short story I’d always liked.

You can read this story literally: a lonely wife seeking attention from her dullard husband and asking to retrieve and keep the cat stuck outside under the park bench, seeking sanctuary from the buckets of rain. Or you can go further. Analyses range from the sexual (Husband dry and desiccated; wife wanting the dripping kitty cat: need I say more?) to the psychological (wife who feels abandoned; husband/psuedo father figure who is withholding; cat as child figure) to the political (the Americans are unhappy while the Italians appreciate the nature outside and the sacrifices made during the war; the Italian concierge listens to the whining nameless American wife while her American husband just reads blindly. By the end of the story, wifey is known only as the American girl–no longer even the American wife. She’s been demoted further.)

I think the wife deserves a name–perhaps Kate. (And, by the way, do we know if the big tortoise cat brought to Kate by the kind Italian chambermaid is the cat under the bench getting drenched or a substitute cat?)

I didn’t expect to discuss The Cat in the Rain in this post but since seeing the plaque in Rapallo, I was drawn to it. So what do you think? Do you love that story; hate it; is it clear to you what it’s about? I’m pretty literal and read it as the lonely, a bit childish wife, trying to get attention from her distracted husband and wanting something to nurture. I just read another analysis by a guy who thinks the wife is just a brat, end of analysis. But heck, that’s the fun of the short story. A lot is packed into a small package. Kind of like my beagle. (My beagle, Vilulah, has since passed away but I still have two large dogs ready to fill in for her. She was the best.)

P.S. See the link below. I just found this sacrilegious but hilarious take on Hem’s whole life. beware obscenities. If you can’t deal with that, please skip. it is laden with them. But still so funny. Really, it’s not to be missed if you love Hemingway.

http://historicalscandals.wordpress.com/tag/adriana-ivancich/