This is by Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). It is dedicated to Hadley Richardson Hemingway, his first wife. It was written during their time in Paris, and it's his first book-length work.

My audio-version was brilliantly read by Chris Andrew Ciulla. This is another book, I think, that is best listened to.


Great narrator, terrible cover (much as I like steam trains)

I'll get to the quite complex publishing history and structure in a minute, but I'll start by saying that this is the Hemingway I've enjoyed the most... His classic, pared-down, laconic style really works here. He is absolutely the master of understatement, and manages to conjure up a tense situation, complete with underlying mood and tone, in just a few sentences of conversation.

The narrator of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas at one point switches from Hemingway's baby son to the mentoring of writers: "Gertrude Stein never corrects any detail of anybody's writing, she sticks strictly to general principles, the way of seeing what the writer chooses to see, and the relation between that vision and the way it gets down. When the vision is not complete the words are flat, it is very simple, there can be no mistake about it, so she insists. It was at this time that Hemingway began the short things that afterwards were printed in a volume called In Our Time." It seems clear some influence is being claimed.

Sylvia Beach, however, comments in Shakespeare and Company: "Hemingway read us one of the stories from In Our Time. We were impressed by his originality, his very personal style, his skillful workmanship, his tidiness, his storyteller's gift and sense of the dramatic, his power to create -- well, I could go on, but as Adrienne [Monnier] summed him up: 'Hemingway has the true writer's temperament'... Though the question who has influenced such and such a writer has never bothered me..., I do think Hemingway readers should know who taught him to write: it was Ernest Hemingway."

The edition I read was the 1925 one, published by Boni and Liveright. Some of the sections in this volume had already been published in reviews, but much of it was original material.


A very classy cover...

The book consists of 15 stories, interleaved with "interchapters". The latter are brief and unadorned, but very punchy.

They convey scenes from Hemingway's time in the army during WWI; and from his time as a journalist, covering the Greco-Turkish war and the resultant streams of refugees fleeing Eastern Thrace: "The carts were jammed for thirty miles along the Karagatch road... No end and no beginning. Just carts loaded with everything they owned... The Maritza was running yellow almost up to the bridge... There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying..." It's 1922, and he's only 23, remember.


This is the Maritza (also known as Maritsa or Meric or Evros) that we met in Didymoteicho earlier this year. And the conflict Hem describes is the one we hear so much about in Kapka Kassabova's Border and Sophia Nikolaidou's The Scapegoat

Another interchapter concerns the execution of six ministers in Athens (for some, these few terse lines, just a paragraph in all, constitute "one of the best things he ever wrote"). There's another rather strange one about the execution of Sam Cardinella, who was hanged sitting on a chair (see here for one theory as to why). Several have to do with bullfighting, prefiguring later work.

And finally, there's L'Envoi, where we meet King George II of the Hellenes. Colonel Nicholas Plastiras and his Revolutionary Committee have virtually made the king and queen prisoners within the palace grounds (in December 1923, they go into exile, and don't return for 12 years). As E.R. Hagemann points out: "Time-and-history in these sixteen Chapters begins in a garden in Mons and terminates artistically in a garden in Athens; begins with the Tommies shooting Germans and ends with George II saying that Plastiras 'did right ... shooting those chaps,' that is, the six Greeks in Chapter V. The decade begins with death and ends with death, but as George so cheerfully puts it, 'The great thing in this sort of an affair is not to be shot oneself.'... There is no peace In Our Time."

This is all quite powerful just as it is, and indeed these vignettes came out by themselves in 1924. Called in our time (lower case), the book was published by Ezra Pound's three mountains press (also lower case).




"the author wood-cut from portrait by henry strater" -- what is it with this hatred for capitals?

The 1925 edition, however, also has 15 substantive chapters, which alternate with the vignettes. These are short stories, but they are linked. Indeed, D.H. Lawrence, in a 1927 review quoted here, comments: "In Our Time calls itself a book of stories, but it isn’t that. It is a series of successive sketches from a man’s life, and makes a fragmentary novel."

That's a great way of putting it.

Eight of the stories/chapters feature Nick Adams, generally reckoned to be Hemingway's autobiographical alter ego. We meet his doctor father and his rather overbearing mother; follow him through his break-up with Marjorie ("'What's the matter, Nick?' Marjorie asked. 'I don't know,' Nick said... 'What's really the matter?' 'I don't know.' 'Of course you know.' ... 'It isn't fun any more. Not any of it'"), and his inability to decide whether he regrets this or not (he half hopes he'll "get back into it again", but when he gets outside into the bluster, "the Marge business was no longer so tragic. It was not even very important. The wind blew everything like that away..."). There's an early encounter with an aggressive railway brakeman and a mentally disturbed, washed-up boxer; there's a carefree skiing trip with a friend (over George's head lies the prospect of returning to college; over Nick's the prospect of becoming a father). And there'a two-parter called Big Two-Hearted River, where Nick goes off into the wilds to camp and fish (these are my least favourites, because they're too reminiscent of the Hemingway I didn't like much in my youth, but there'll well done for all that).


"The burned country stopped off at the left with the range of hills..."

The remaining seven chapters/stories ostensibly feature other protagonists. Some are very recognizably Hemingway, though. A Very Short Story, for example, talks about a doomed wartime romance between a patient and a nurse. The equivalent incident in Hemingway's life is mentioned by Paula McLain, and the theme resurfaces in A Farewell to Arms. Nor is it hard to detect elements of Hemingway in the stories depicting disorientation on returning from the war, or discontent with a marriage, or disappointment over an excursion that doesn't quite work out.

My Old Man is a bit of an odd one out, although it does reflect Hemingway's love of horse-racing. The story called Mr and Mrs Elliot, meanwhile, was rumoured to satirize the marriage of Chard Powers Smith, but it also contains plenty of swipes at the Paris life Hemingway would have known: "It became increasingly important to [Huber and Cornelia Elliot] that they should have a baby, and even though someone had pointed out Ezra Pound to them in a cafe and they had watched James Joyce eating in the Trianon and almost been introduced to a man called Leo Stein, it was to be explained to them who he was later, they decided to go to Dijon... They found there was nothing to do in Dijon. Hubert, however, was writing a great number of poems and Cornelia typed them for him... They came to Paris... So they all sat around the Cafe du Dome, avoiding the Rotonde across the street because it is always so full of foreigners."

Here's Lawrence again, very perceptively: "It is a short book: and it does not pretend to be about one man. But it is. It is as much as we need know of the man’s life. The sketches are short, sharp, vivid... And these few sketches are enough to create the man and all his history: we need know no more... Mr Hemingway’s sketches ... are excellent: so short, like striking a match, lighting a brief sensational cigarette, and it’s over."

The 1930 Scribner's edition of In Our Time features an additional chapter, an introduction entitled On the Quai at Smyrna. Hemingway himself never got as far as Smyrna in 1922, but the eye-witness accounts he draws on are vivid and shocking. This makes for a dramatic opening, and immediately tips us into Hemingway's terse style (it opens: "The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight. I do not know why they screamed at that time"). But it's less effective, in my view, than the lower-key, undramatic original.


Izmir, 2019

Very powerful writing, then. Admirable. Whatever you end up thinking about the man, his talent is beyond question.