Men Without Women: Ernest Hemingway (Arrow Classic S)

Product Information

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar , to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid. Martha Gellhorn served as third wife of Hemingway in 1940. When he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II, they separated; he presently witnessed at the Normandy landings and liberation of Paris. 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. Terse literary style of Ernest Miller Hemingway, an American writer, ambulance driver of World War I , journalist, and expatriate in Paris during the 1920s, marks short stories and novels, such as The Sun Also Rises (1926) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which concern courageous, lonely characters, and he won the Nobel Prize of 1954 for literature. His most famous novels such as "The Old Man and the Sea" and "A Farewell to Arms" helped him win the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. All of this was overshadowed by bouts of depression which he suffered throughout his life and which led to his suicide in 1961. (Chambers Biographical Dictionary)

Desire in The Sun Also Rises is impossible. Desire is unhealthy or even unnatural—Brett and Jake’s bodies cannot live up to it. Many critics have linked Jake’s impotence to the decimation of World War I, which is certainly a factor; behind the enforced gaiety of the novel, the characters are reeling and damaged from the war. In a discarded foreword, Hemingway explained that writing about his generation was not a matter of wondering “what kind of mothers flappers make or where is bobbed hair leading us. For whatever is going to happen to this generation of which I am a part has already happened.” But Jake’s impotence also lends itself to a parallel with banned sexuality, sexuality that may be longed for but never resolved. In this way, it is also a clear stand-in for queer romance, both viscerally physical and psychological. Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”—is a line from one of the few women who speak in the book, appropriately telling off a blowhard (male) soon-to-be-ex. The characters never mention Jake’s affliction aloud, only talking around Jake’s “war injury”, and between Brett and Jake it is a silent, understood gulf. If it’s easy to interpret Jake’s impotence as a metaphor for societal damage, it’s equally easy to interpret it as one of societal prejudice. Jake and Brett want to have sex and be together: they’re just not allowed. Even the very unspokenness of the romance, rarely mentioned by Brett and Jake to anyone else, lends itself towards queer readings of closeted love. Lady Brett, wounded herself, is as implicated in this queer romance as Jake is. Tale by tale, the different women – unassuaged, and who can blame them – move off to the peripheries. The men apologise for themselves and are content to drift, remaining puzzled as much by their own behaviour as anyone else’s. Their stories are never less than readable, comic, amiably fantastic, human, yet with an entertainingly sarcastic edge, but verge on the bland. Unlike Hemingway’s Italian soldier, they can’t pinpoint the moment their lives went wrong; they barely remember their previous condition – and not well enough to describe it. Have they learned anything from experience? They say so. We’re left wondering if that’s true, or if, like Kino the barman, they’re really courting self-erasure. First edition, first printing, of Hemingway's collection of 14 stories in which, as noted by the blurb, "the softening feminine influence is almost wholly absent - either through training, discipline, death, or situation".I had two short story collections before me with the title 'Men Without Women', one by Ernest Hemingway, the other by Haruki Murakami. I went with Hemingway's because it was slimmer and had a nice cover photograph of some men sitting at a doorway drinking beer and smoking cigarettes (yeah, I'm shallow that way). Well,’ the man said, ‘if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.’

Fifty Grand” resembles a story, “A Matter of Colour,” Hem published in his high school literary magazine, Tabula, when he attended Oak Park High School (which I, name dropper, mention because it is near my house, and where they have a small shrine to the local hero outside the school). The story is one of a fight fix gone badly, and is really wonderful. 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. 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': in the following periodicals: The American Caravan, The Atlantic Monthly, The Little Review, The New Republic, La Nouvelle Revue Française, This Quarter, Der Querschnitt, The woman came out through the curtains with two glasses of beer and put them down on the damp felt pads. ‘ The train comes in five minutes ,’ she said.In 1917, Hemingway joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The following year, he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was badly wounded but decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919, and married in 1921. In 1922, he reported on the Greco-Turkish war before resigning from journalism to devote himself to fiction. He settled in Paris where he renewed his earlier friendships with such fellow-American expatriates as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Their encouragement and criticism were to play a valuable part in the formation of his style. There’s a dialled-down quality to these men. Their exchanges with other people are limited to bedrooms and bars. They have one eccentricity each: they care about reading or cooking or the history of popular music. Murakami Man, we begin to see, has no friends because, in the pursuit of convenience and emotional self-protection, in proofing himself against grief, he chose distance. He chose loneliness long before he experienced loss. As a result, he is unable to take advantage of the predictable life he has been at such pains to organise. If he fails to connect with others, he fails, equally, to connect with himself. 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.