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A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway In Our Time ed. by J. Gerald Kennedy

2022; Volume: 42; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hem.2022.0022

1548-4815

Linda Patterson Miller,

American and British Literature Analysis

Reviewed by: A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway In Our Time ed. by J. Gerald Kennedy Linda Patterson Miller A Norton Critical Edition: Ernest Hemingway In Our Time. Edited by J. Gerald Kennedy. W. W. Norton & Company, 2022. 416 pp. Paperback. $15.00. J. Gerald Kennedy's Norton Critical Edition of Ernest Hemingway In Our Time is a welcome addition to Hemingway scholarship. In keeping with the series format, Kennedy provides an authoritative text along with key contextual materials (in this case, pertinent correspondence, journalism, early reviews, and the most telling and timely academic scholarship) such that readers become well-armed with a nuanced and luminous comprehension of Hemingway's first short story collection. Considering that Hemingway scholarship has tended to highlight many of the stories in In Our Time, particularly the Nick Adams stories, it is important to confront these stories and their inter-linking vignettes (Hemingway calls them Chapters) as a larger whole. Kennedy's book addresses the complex weave of Hemingway's modernist masterpiece in one taut edition that every student and reader of Hemingway will want to acquire. Kennedy's Introduction provides the biographical background that leads up to Hemingway's crafting of In Our Time, and while readers and scholars of Hemingway will recognize much of this biographical context, Kennedy's introduction nicely telescopes pertinent facts that contributed to this work that "evolved at first haphazardly" from "a handful of stories, poems, and prose poems in avant-garde journals" to "two small, limited-edition chapbooks: Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) and the eighteen short, jarring prose pieces he titled (lowercasing, in the manner of E. E. Cummings) in our time (1924)"(ix). This ultimately culminated in 1925 as In Our Time, the work that "launched the international career of Ernest Hemingway and broached the themes of his first major novels" (ix). Kennedy recognizes the significance of the loss of Hemingway's early manuscripts in late 1922, which he attributes to the theft of the valise containing Hemingway's writing that Hemingway's first wife Hadley had carried onto the train at the Gare de Lyon, and he acknowledges the almost miraculous output that occurred after Hemingway returned to Paris in the spring of 1924 following the birth of his son Bumby in Toronto. As Kennedy describes it, "at the lovely old café where he liked to work, La Closerie des Lilas, Hemingway discovered that stories became more suggestive when he resisted the urge to explain things," and he composed in just a few months eight of the stories that would both center and elevate In Our Time (xiv). It was [End Page 103] as if the loss of his earlier writing forced him to minimize, to recognize the importance that what the writer leaves out is more important than what he puts in. As Hemingway composed these early stories now recognized as among the best he would ever write, it "marked the debut," as Kennedy describes it, "of a writer who truly changed the language of modern prose fiction" (xx). One of the more fascinating portions of this critical edition gathers pertinent early reviews of In Our Time written upon its publication in late 1925. These reviews (there are eight of them here) explode off the page to highlight how shockingly new and fascinating to the learned reading public was the prose of this relatively unknown writer Hemingway. Schuyler Ashley's review in The Kansas City Star (12 Dec. 1925) is representative. Hemingway's "short sentences bite like acid," he writes; and "the infrequent expletives snarl and rumble like loaded trucks under a viaduct" (168). Paul Rosenfield's review in The New Republic (25 Nov. 1925) is equally pithy and telling. "This newcomer's prose departs from the kindred literary mediums as a youngling from forebears. Wanting some of the warmth of Anderson and some of the pathos of Gertrude Stein, Hemingway's style none the less [sic] in its very experimental stage shows the outline of a new, tough, severe and satisfying beauty related equally to the world of machinery and the austerity of the red man" (165-66). If these early reviews underscore how In Our Time changed the literary vernacular to...