'Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates' and male taciturnity in Hemingway's "A Day's Wait." - Ernest Hemingway

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1993 by Susan F. Beegel

Complaints like Raban's are made possible by critics who read "A Day's Wait" as though it were a child's pirate story, or who exclude "A Day's Wait" and other investigations of parenting from the Hemingway canon.(8) In truth, "A Day's Wait" indicts Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates and similar boys' books as poor models for American manhood, and questions the very ideals of masculinity Hemingway is most thought to valorize. Rejecting both Raban's "tribal literature" and its ethos of solitary self-reliance, "A Day's Wait" elects instead to heroize the domestic and explore the painful cost of failing to express affection.

(1) In "Up and Down: Making Connections in |A Day's Wait,'" Linda Gajdusek provides a useful overview of the short story's interpretive criticism and concludes that it has "failed to attract much serious attention" because it offers "such an easy, seemingly trivial amusement" (291). George Monteiro has given serious attention to the "O. Henry ending" criticism by exploring the indebtedness of "A Day's Wait' to O. Henry's 1907 short story "The Last Leaf," about a girl desperately ill with pneumonia. (2) Arthur Waldhorn calls Schatz "a Lilliputian model of an exemplary hero" (71). Joseph DeFalco refers to the boy's "victory over the inner forces of the self" (54). And Wirt Williams refers to Schatz's "triumph" over "overwhelming catastrophe" (104). (3) Sheldon Norman Grebstein remarks that in "A Day's Wait," Hemingway "handles a potentially sentimental situation without expressing feeling in overt terms and without calling directly upon the reader's sense of pathos. We surmise the father's love and concern for his sick son not from any declaration of it in exposition or dialogue but rather from a series of observations, gestures and dramatic metaphors" (9-10). This masculine taciturnity is, of course, the soul of the Hemingway style. But Grebstein might have gone on to note that "A Day's Wait" is also profoundly critical of its own style. The child's terrifying misunderstanding occurs precisely because father and son handle "a potentially sentimental situation without expressing feeling in overt terms" and fail to "read" their observations of one another's gestures and dramatic metaphors. (4) Although Philip Young chose not to include "A Day's Wait" in his 1972 collection, The Nick Adams Stories, most critics have followed Carlos Baker's identification of the story's unnamed narrator as Nick Adams (Baker 134). Paul Smith's A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway provides the most compelling reason for siding with Baker - in the manuscripts of "Fathers and Sons," Nick Adams's boy is called "Schatz" (304). (5) Virtually all critics of "A Day's Wait" have commented on the role of Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates in the story, but no one has addressed the actual contents of the popular boys' book that so engrosses Schatz's father. Among Hemingway scholars, only Sheridan Baker seems to have looked into Pyle - but his emphasis is the book's slight influence on To Have and Have Not: