Hemingway's In Our Time: Lyrical Dimensions. - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1994 by Donald D. Kummings

Like James Joyce's Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, two books that profoundly influenced it, Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time has provoked many questions and comments about generic form. Since its publication on 5 October 1925, In Our Time has been called, among other things, a "bildungsroman," a "fragmentary novel," a "short story miscellany," a "short story cycle," and a "literary hybrid" that combines something of the variety of an anthology of stories with something of the homogeneity of a novel. Invariably accompanying critical discussions of genre has been a concern with structure. Although Hemingway was painstaking in his arrangement of the 32 stories and interchapters in In Our Time, and although he himself declared on several occasions that the pieces have "a pretty good unity," some critics have found the work's structure problematic, lacking cohesiveness. Wendolyn Tetlow, too, focuses on structure but maintains that In Our Time "is a coherent, integral work." She points out that a number of elements contribute to the work's unity - the character Nick Adams, recurring topics and themes, image patterns, symbols - but concludes that the book's structure is, at the deepest level, lyrical.

At the heart of Tetlow's argument is her belief that the relationship among Hemingway's stories and interchapters is analogous to that within a poetic sequence as described by M. L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall in The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry (1983): "a grouping of mainly lyric poems and passages, rarely uniform in pattern, which tend to interact as an organic whole. It usually includes narrative and dramatic elements, and ratiocinative ones as well, but its structure is finally lyrical." The upshot of this belief is that the structure of In Our Time most closely resembles that of such sequences as Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberly and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, poems that progress by means of a succession of "tonal centers."

After brief introductory remarks, Tetlow divides her study into five parts. Chapter one discusses six prose pieces that Hemingway published in 1923 in Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap's Little Review. Entitled "In Our Time," these highly polished paragraphs have a discernible structure: they are connected not only by a preoccupation with violence but also by "lyric tonalities." Chapter two analyzes in our time (Paris: The Three Mountains Press, 1924), a small book that was made when Hemingway added 12 prose pieces to the six previously published in the Little Review. "In the sequence of eighteen," says Tetlow, "Hemingway continued to use language to build lyric centers rather than for dramatic or narrative purposes." Chapters three and four closely examine the lyrical structure of the stories and interchapters of the fully developed In Our Time, a volume first published by Boni and Liveright (1925) and, subsequently, in a slightly augmented version by Scribner's (1930). In this book, Hemingway combined his prose pieces with new and previously published short stories. Tetlow maintains that the book's deliberately ordered sequence of tonally interrelated works reveals a movement from "painful awareness of senseless death and the failure of traditional values - love, honor in war, self-respect - [to an] attempt at coping with this knowledge with stoicism and an assertion of personal values." Chapter five shows how the structure of In Our Time anticipates the emotive pattern of a later work, the novel A Farewell to Arms (1929).

Tetlow's study of In Our Time does have a few imperfections. Its method - its close attention to language, to recurring images and sounds, and its step-by-step approach to interchapters and stories - is sometimes plodding and makes for slow reading. However, given the author's objective, it is difficult to see how she might have proceeded differently. Another problem is her contention that Nick Adams's effort at spiritual healing in "Big Two-Hearted River" brings In Our Time to an affirmative conclusion. The pessimistic epilogue, "L'Envoi," tempers that interpretation more than she seems willing to admit. Overall, though, her study is a highly useful contribution to Hemingway criticism. It is absolutely on target in emphasizing the poetic nature of In Our Time. It is also on the mark in insisting on the importance for Hemingway of aesthetic principles derived from Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. From Pound, Hemingway learned something about "direct treatment of the |thing,' whether subjective or objective," and about using "no word that does not contribute to the presentation." From Eliot, he learned something about the "waste land" motif and the concept of the" objective correlative." Tetlow's book is, finally, a much-needed discussion of the function of lyrical elements in Hemingway's calculated juxtaposition of stories and interchapters in In Our Time.