Men Without Women: Ernest Hemingway (Arrow Classic S)

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The girl looked across at the hills.‘They’re lovely hills,’ she said. ‘They don’t really look like white elephants. I just meant the colouring of their skin through the trees.’ In his inability to create a straightforward a gay romance, Hemingway instead allows his characters to become genderqueer, genderfluid, to play with roles and switch sides. This centerpiece scene, of Catherine as the architect and executor, threads queerness through her character as much as it does David’s. She is as queer in this scene as when, later in the novel, she sleeps with Marita, another female character. Hemingway is known for his objective and terse prose, significantly succinct and precise. This is no better exemplified from the following passage from the story 'A Simple Enquiry': Hemingway's first two published works were Three Stories and Ten Poems and In Our Time but it was the satirical novel, The Torrents of Spring, that established his name more widely. His international reputation was firmly secured by his next three books; Fiesta, Men Without Women and A Farewell to Arms. In “Yesterday”, Tanimura, who is from Kansai, divests himself so completely from the Kansai dialect that no one in Tokyo can believe he comes from there; while his friend Kitaru, in the attempt to become a serious supporter of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team, submerges himself in the Kansai dialect to the point where he seems to have been born there. Meanwhile, the narrator of “An Independent Organ” is teasing us: “I’m sure you’ll understand that the veracity of each tiny detail really isn’t critical.” All that matters, surely, is that “a clear portrait should emerge”.

The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads.After high school, Hemingway reported for a few months for the Kansas City Star before leaving for the Italian front to enlist. In 1918, someone seriously wounded him, who returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. In 1922, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives. The couple moved, and he worked as a foreign correspondent and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the expatriate community of the "lost generation" of 1920s. Long, Ray - editor. (1932). "Why Editors Go Wrong: ' Fifty Grand' by Ernest Hemingway", 20 Best Stories in Ray Long's 20 Years as an Editor. New York: Crown Publishers. 1-3 Originally published in October 1927, the second short-story collection published by Pulitzer Prize winner and Nobel Laureate Ernest Hemingway contains the following fourteen stories: Yes,’ said the girl. ‘Everything tastes of liquorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe. ’

Each story within this small book had a message and each message was pretty darn dark and sad, but poignant. The peasant and his wife lived a hard life. We know that. And he was an ex-soldier who'd likely witnessed some terrible things. Both of these experiences would have altered death for the man and necessarily pushed the pragmatic over the spiritual for him. The best of these stories are among the finest in the English language: “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Killers,” “In Another Country,” “Fifty Grand,” “Now I Lay Me,” though I want to make a pitch, too, for the story of the aging bullfighter in “The Undefeated,” which has amazing passages of description, as painful as it is now for most people to see the cruelty of the slow killing of the bull. But the twin portraits of the older bullfighter and bull are powerful, in spite of that. Both are undefeated, in the way of The Old Man in the Sea. You are changing,” she said. “Oh you are. You are. Yes you are and you’re my girl Catherine. Will you change and be my girl and let me take you?” The title is a misnomer in the sense that there are female characters here but they are so peripheral to the stories (except in Hills like...) as to be non-existent!

Sex in fiction is not the same as sex in real life: when Catherine and David play with gender, they are not just a straight couple wandering into faintly kinky waters. They are transforming, hiding shifting bodies, loves and queerness behind Hemingway’s stark sentences. The scene is, unmistakably, a fantasy of gay sex, and a microcosm of Hemingway’s anxiety, tension, and fascination with the muddy waters of queer sexuality. He is drawn towards queerness and repelled in the same moment; he can accept a romantic male friendship, but squirms at that last step toward transgression.