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The Cambridge introduction to the American short story
telling than the longer-drawn-out and more romantic grief of the hero Robert Henry, in a similar situation, in A Farewell To Arms. As Edmund Wilson says, Hemingway does not show a novelist’s ‘solid sense of character’: ‘the people in his short stories are satisfactory because he only has to hit them oV: the point of the story does not lie in personalities, but in the emotion to which a situation gives rise’.9 The major’s grief at his wife’s death, in a story about war, prompts a critical paradox: Hemingway’s art, so often associated with his public persona as above all the masculine, indeed ‘macho’ writer (bullfight aficionado, biggame hunter, deep-sea fisherman etc.), may perhaps be at its finest and least complacent when it is dealing about men with women, and about the ambiguities of sexual experience. And in this area too, the short story, with its mobility of experimentation and its ability to focus on new areas of experience in ways that epitomize large problems, was particularly important to Hemingway. The early story ‘Up In Michigan’ was omitted from In Our Time because the publisher, Liveright, objected to its explicit sexual content.10 But from today’s perspective it strikes one as a sensitive treatment of a youthful sexual encounter, in which the man’s clumsiness and callousness is contrasted with the girl’s deeper emotional involvement and tenderness. The story is told in the third person, but its point of view and style is primarily that of the girl, Liz: Hemingway uses a kind of free indirect discourse, which describes Liz’s feelings by using her own style of language, but without quotation marks (e.g. ‘When she saw the wagon coming down the road she felt weak and sick sort of inside’).11 ‘Cat in the Rain’ (from In Our Time), about a bored American couple in an Italian hotel, is also told mainly from the woman’s point of view. Focusing on the briefest and slightest of incidents (the woman’s sudden desire to rescue the cat from the rain), it evokes the whole world of the relationship: the rainy Italian town, the rootless hotel existence, the woman’s frustrated desire for children and her responsiveness to the hotel padrone’s old-world courtesy, the man’s terse boredom. The story works poetically – a case of the short story as lyric poem – but without poeticizing, to suggest a whole condition through simple, concrete details and snatches of banal conversation. The woman’s point of view is again central to one of Hemingway’s most famous stories about men and women (and also his own favourite story), ‘Hills Like White Elephants’. This is another episode-story, presenting simply a couple’s forty-minute wait at a small Spanish railway station and their conversation about (it is implicitly clear but never stated) the woman’s proposed abortion. The story is almost entirely made up of simple dialogue, and its success lies in the way this dialogue is charged with tone and