The Nick Adams Stories
Alderman, Taylor
Book Review The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway preface by Philip Young Charles Scribner's Sons, $7.95 In this volume are assembled Ernest Hemingway's twenty-five short stories, sketches,...
...The Nick Adams material was then gathered into two successive, omnibus volumes of short fiction...
...The plot contains, for Hemingway, a number of surprisingly clumsy shifts...
...But the reader who does not know the adventures of Nick Adams would do well to dip into this volume...
...Hemingway buffs will recall Nick Adams as the fictional character whose background and experiences closely parallel those of Hemingway himself...
...once again one feels that Hemingway's editorial judgment was generally sound...
...The former, especially, seems incomplete and unfinished...
...Dismally inferior to the fishing story as we know it, "On Writing" is an interior monologue in which Nick ramblingly thinks of bullfighting, old friends, and literary acquaintances and reputations...
...Nick crosses the great river on a train as the White Sox win the World Series...
...He could have published the eight "new" pieces which appear in this volume-but he did not...
...Taylor Alderman...
...The Indians Moved Away" evokes a mood of sadness at the disappearance of the Indians from northern Michigan...
...Book Review The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway preface by Philip Young Charles Scribner's Sons, $7.95 In this volume are assembled Ernest Hemingway's twenty-five short stories, sketches, and fragments in which Nick Adams appears...
...They have been widely praised and anthologized, and they need no review, here or elsewhere...
...The eight pieces are, however, an odd lot...
...it bears no relationship to the ritualistic fishing trip which structures the more familiar tale...
...It is, granted, a minor point, but it is worth emphasizing: this book-as a gathering of its separate parts-is a creation not of the author but of others...
...To the contrary, he seems to have considered each Nick Adams work as a separate piece...
...With his groomsmen, Nick dresses for the marriage ceremony and later rows away across the lake with his bride...
...Nick and his sister live in the woods, enjoying a psychologically incestuous relationship as Nick, himself, thoroughly alienated from his society, considers how he can survive as a runaway...
...The "new" Nick Adams material in this book is decidedly inferior to the "old...
...Wedding Day" and "Crossing the Mississippi" appear to be brief, preliminary sketches which were never developed...
...Nick appears in several of Hemingway's finest short stories- which is to say, in several of the finest short stories ever written in English: "The Killers," "In Another Country," "Big Two-Hearted River," "The Battler...
...These masterpieces have been in print for decades...
...The most significant pieces in the book are "Summer People," a short story in which Nick goes swimming and later makes love to his girlfriend of that summer, and "The Last Good Country," a lengthy fragment which treats Nick's flight with his younger sister from two game wardens who plan to arrest Nick for game violations...
...He could have reworked the Nick Adams stories into a novel (as the Harry Morgan stories became To Have and Have Not)-but he did not...
...The reading public is indebted to Mary Hemingway and to Charles Scribner's Sons for making available the previously unpublished Nick Adams material...
...Night Before Landing" presents Nick on board ship approaching France during World War I. This fragment is the opening passage of a novel which Hemingway abandoned...
...But one should remember that there is no evidence that Hemingway himself thought of the Nick Adams stories as forming together a single work of literary art...
...The boy Nick is afraid of the night, and ashamed of his fear, and he achieves at least a partial understanding of himself and his fear...
...The fragment published here as "Three Shots" was originally the opening section of "Indian Camp," the story in which Nick as a boy watches, horrified, as his father delivers a baby by performing a Caesarian section with a jackknife...
...It is all extremely self-conscious and artificial...
...he is shocked to learn that Hemingway wrote it at all...
...The reader is not surprised to learn that Hemingway cut it from the story before publication...
...Perhaps...
...The "Three Shots" section, when read together with "Indian Camp," offers an interesting study of courage and fear which foreshadows "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber...
...Hemingway himself could have assembled the Nick Adams material together in one volume- but he did not...
...What is new about this book is the appearance in print of eight previously unpublished works of fiction...
...But one final observation on The Nick Adams Stones: the dust jacket refers to "the underlying unity in the life of Nick Adams and the dramatic unfolding of this fictional character," and Philip Young speaks of the "meaningful narrative" of Nick Adams' life...
...Two of the works were originally passages from other short stories...
...The seventeen which appeared during Hemingway's lifetime appeared in three different volumes, scattered among some forty other short stories and sketches...
...Because the author is Ernest Hemingway, this volume is by definition a significant literary event...
...The best of Nick Adams contains much of the best of Hemingway, and this volume is a good introduction to Hemingway's art...
...On Writing" originally concluded "Big Two-Hearted River...
Vol. 6 • March 1973 • No. 6
