ENG 261 the Short Story
Allain 1
Carol A. Allain
Professor Susan Goldstein
ENG 261 – The Short Story
27 July 2012
Time of Their Lives
There is something to be said about the fruit of one’s youth. As I age, I realize that, although wisdom grows, life’s energy wanes. “Hills Like White Elephants” was published in 1927 when Hemingway was only 28 years old (Charters, 368). Although published in 1961, “The Man Who was Almost a Man” was originally crafted as “Almos’ a Man” in the mid-1930’s, which would have made Wright around the same age (Ward, 17-18). In his book, “The Season’s of a Man’s Life”, noted psychologist, Daniel J. Levinson, discusses adult male development including what he calls the “Age Thirty Transition”. It is during this period, between the ages of 28 to 33, that men look to fine tune their life’s choices in an attempt to make their future more meaningful (Levinson, 71). I believe that these two stories reveal much about the writers and even more about the readers themselves.
Because “Hills Like White Elephants” is a very short story, Hemingway wastes little time in introducing the reader to “the American”, an apparently carefree globetrotter who is attempting to convince his travelling companion, “the girl” into what we presume is the termination of a pregnancy. “’It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,’ the man said. ‘It’s not really an operation at all’” (Hemingway, 369). Not unlike many young men in the prime of their lives, the American is reluctant to settle down and to share the affection of his girlfriend. “But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want any one else. And I know it’s perfectly simple” (371). In this story, Hemingway honestly reveals this universal male insecurity in spite of the American’s stalwart persona.
With a title like “The Man Who Was Almost a Man”, it is easy to predict that Wright’s story will be designed to shed some light regarding manhood. We meet Dave, a boy teetering between childhood and adulthood. From the very first paragraph it is clear that Dave is unhappy about being treated like a boy as his thoughts declare “One of these days he was going to get a gun and practice shooting, then they [the other field workers] couldn’t talk to him as though he were a little boy” (Wright 878). His frustration is over a collection of relationships with his mother, his father, the men he works with and his boss, “Ol man Hawkins”; all of whom make him feel like a child. To Dave, purchasing and owning a gun makes him feel like a man. “With the gun under his pillow, he reaches for it in the early morning and as he holds it he thinks, ‘Could kill a man with a gun like this. Kill anybody, black or white. And if he were holding this gun in his hand, nobody could run over him; they would have to respect him’” (881-882). As a young black man himself, Richard Wright would have also experienced some of the same feelings as Dave; and at this point in his life, Wright was ready to reveal these feelings to the world.
In both of these stories, Hemingway and Wright use a hot and fruitless landscape as a metaphorical inscription of man’s yearning for respect and security. At the train station where the American and the girl wait; “The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry” (Hemingway, 368). The two spend most of the story sampling a variety of alcoholic beverages, seemingly insatiable. The landscape is parched, the couple is thirsty and their relationship is drying up as they try to come to terms about the little life that hangs in the balance.
In like manner, Wright places Dave in a hot and dusty setting. He works for Mr. Hawkins, tilling the dirt in the heat of the day (878). Before anything will begin to grow, he must sweat and toil to cultivate the soil. It is also in this dirt that Dave takes the life of the mule, Jenny, and it is here that her blood meets up with the same earth that will become her grave (882-884). As spoken at many graveside burials, the words "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust” (Webber, 28) ring true as Wright draws a connection between young Dave just starting out in his life and the reality that death will come to one and all . Wright makes this connection even clearer when he shows Dave contemplating the way he is being mistreated, “Dam em all! Nobody ever gave him anything. All he did was work. They treat me like a mule…” (886). At this stage in both Hemingway and Wright’s lives, their contemplation on the fragility of life is realized in these works.
After reading both of these stories I imagine that Hemingway and Wright spent a lot of time observing people. The ideas that come out in their stories are evidence of what they have witnessed rather than a form of judgment. Not surprisingly, both of these men were journalists at one time and both possessed the ability to be concise in their writing. Although only about ten years younger than Hemingway, Richard Wright acknowledges Hemingway’s influence. He wrote in a 1938 essay, “All of us young writer’s were influenced by Hemingway…We liked the simple and direct way in which he wrote” (How Uncle Tom’s Children Grew, 16). At this stage in their literary careers, both Hemingway and Wright were coming into their own. Beyond their own lifetimes, their works have influenced generations throughout the world.
Their succinct writing style affected another aspect of their story-telling. In both of their works these writers provide little information about the physical appearance of their characters. This characteristic in their writing prevents the reader from “judge[ing] a book by its cover” (Hirsch, 50), as it were. For example, if Hemingway described the American as an overweight, balding man wearing an ill-fitting knit shirt with a coffee stain on his chest, the reader would immediately begin to judge the character in a way that has little to do with his actions. And in “The Man Who Was Almost a Man”, Wright never even comes right out and describes Dave as a black man; the reader is left to figure that out by the dialogue which transpires between the characters. Wright describes the people in the town as black and white but it is not until his mother hollers at Dave and says “’Nigger, is yuh gone plumb crazy?’” (880) that we have any written evidence as to the color of his skin.
Whether the characters are speaking out loud or thinking to themselves, the emphasis of these two stories is on dialogue and not description. According to UCLA’s Laboratory of Neural Imaging, the average person has 70,000 thoughts per day (What Do We Know About the Brain?). As all of these ideas spill out onto the page, the personalities of the characters take shape. There is a melding of minds, so to speak, of both the writer and reader. And the most exciting part is that every reader can have their own interpretation of the story.
Following is some evidence of the dominance of dialogue in these two stories. In “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” the story contains 158 sets of quotation marks and in “Hills Like White Elephants” there are 115; that is a lot of dialogue for short stories. Both of these stories are driven by conversation and I believe that one can learn much more about someone by listening to what they say than merely watching what they are doing.
In “Hills Like White Elephants”, the dialogue between the American and the girl is often uneventful and stunted, not unlike conversation in real life. When people are frustrated or uncomfortable, words are often curt. In this story we learn that “It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes” (368). Sitting in a stifling train station with a heavy topic weighing on their minds, the characters’ short sentences seem very realistic.
Any mother that has ever taken their child shopping can relate to the conversation that Wright creates between Dave and his mother as he tries to persuade and charm her into letting him buy the gun. “’Ma, ef yuh lemme buy one Ah’ll never ast yuh fer nothing no mo” (881). Apparently that trick has been used by children for quite some time! Not unlike real life, Dave’s mother succumbs to his persistence and allows him to have the two dollars to buy the gun. Primarily through dialogue, these writers make the characters come alive.
Another point to consider when comparing these two stories is that, just as the American in “Hills Like White Elephants” was living abroad, and Dave from “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” chose to run away from home for a better life, Hemingway and Wright left the familiarity of their hometowns in search of a better life. Wright’s experiences growing up as a black boy in the south, witnessing injustice and prejudice, motivated him to move north in search of a better life. Wright gravitated to a group of people who would provide him with the encouragement and stimulation he longed for as an African American writer. Living in Chicago in his twenties, Wright became affiliated with the Communist Party. It was here that his cutting-edge writing style was given a greater opportunity to be published (Rowley).
Hemingway first fell in love with Europe at the young age of nineteen while he was volunteering as an ambulance driver during World War I. After the war, he returned to Europe in his twenties where he became a part of a group of writers known as the “Lost Generation”, individuals who came of age after World War I. Many of these expatriates moved to France to escape political persecution in their home land. Hemingway, however, lived abroad simply because of his love for the country. In the companionship of some very noteworthy writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway fine-tuned his writing style and set the stage for his future success (Putnam). Hemingway knowingly stated “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Both Hemingway and Wright were born to be writers and, even as very young men, they were drawn towards the places and people that contributed towards their success.
Although they were very young men, both Hemingway and Wright had experienced a lot of the ugly side of life before their thirtieth birthdays. Hemingway was severely injured during World War I while only a teenager (Putnam) and it is described that the “experience in the war had matured him beyond his years”. Additionally, when Ernest was only twenty-nine years old, his father committed suicide (“Hemingway Resource Center”). Ernest blamed his overbearing mother for his father’s untimely death even calling her “an all American bitch” (Azhar).
Richard Wright was not spared the ravages of a difficult childhood either. His father abandoned the family when Richard was only a boy and his mother struggled to feed their family. In his autobiography entitled, “Black Boy”, Wright describes the uncomfortable feeling of hunger he experienced as a boy, “Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at me gauntly...But this new hunger baffled me, scared me, made me angry and insistent” (Wright). While still a teenager, his mother was taken ill and Richard began to support his family on the meager means he was able to earn as a young black man during the Depression (Rowley).
I believe that part of the reason that both Hemingway and Wright were able to speak in a powerful manner, while merely being men in their twenties, was in part because they were both provided an early welcome mat into the harshness of life. Writing provided both of these men an outlet for their disappointments and frustrations. Inspirational Speaker, Tony Robbins described this phenomenon when he wrote “Either you use stress or it uses you. Some people go through terrible things and are able to move beyond them and, indeed, use their experiences to help others” (Robbins). Everyone will someday have suffering, yet it is what one does with the experience that makes the difference.
An eloquent and honest writer, Hemingway spoke these powerful words, “Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged” (Hemingway, 56). As Hemingway and Wright were approaching their thirties they were emotionally, psychologically and physically in a place that would propagate their craft; and the world was ready to listen. With proficient use of their clear and concise writing these men proved to generations throughout the world that even the short-story can provide a revelation about the reader and writer alike.
Works Cited
Azhar, Samina. "Depiction of Women in Hemingway." IUP Journal of American Literature. Feb-May. (2010): n. page. Web. 3 Aug. 2012.
Charters, Ann. "Ernest Hemingway." The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. 367-68. Print.
"Ernest Hemingway Biography>World War I." Hemingway Resource Center. Hemingway Resource Center, 2010. Web. 3 Aug 2012.
Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants.” The Story and Its Writer. Ed. Ann Charters. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. 368-371. Print.
Hirsch, E. D., Joseph F. Kett, and James S. Trefil. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Print.
Levinson, Daniel J. The Seasons of a Man's Life. New York, NY: Ballantine Books Reissue, 1979. eBook.
Putnam, Thomas. "Hemingway on War and Its Aftermath." Prologue Magazine. National Archives, 2006. Web. 3 Aug 2012.
Robbins, Tony. "A Chance to Break Through: How You Can Use Crisis to Transform Your Life." The Huffington Post. N.p., 26 July 2010. Web. 3 Aug. 2012.
Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and times. New York: Owl, 2002. Print.
Ward, Jerry Washington., and Robert Butler. The Richard Wright Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008. Print.
Webber, Elizabeth, and Mike Feinsilber. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Allusions. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1999. Print.
What Do We Know About the Brain? Los Angeles, CA: Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, UCLA, 2008.
Wright, Richard. Black Boy, a Record of Childhood and Youth. New York: Harper & Bros., 1945. Print.
Wright, Richard. “The Man Who Was Almost a Man.” The Story and Its Writer. Ed. Ann Charters. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. 878-887. Print.