In Our Time (short story collection)
The stories' themes – of alienation, loss, grief, separation – continue the work Hemingway began with the vignettes, which include descriptions of acts of war, bullfighting and current events.
[4] Hemingway was 19 years old when in 1918, shortly after he was posted to the Italian Front as a Red Cross ambulance driver, he sustained a severe wound from mortar fire.
[5] A few months after marrying Hadley Richardson in 1921, he and his wife moved to Paris on the strength of her private income and an agreement with the Toronto Star that would supply them with freelance articles on whatever caught his fancy.
[8] In August he asked Hemingway to contribute a small volume to the modernist series he was editing, and Bill Bird was publishing for his Three Mountains Press, which Pound envisioned as the "Inquest into the state of the modern English language".
[11] Before setting off to meet him in Switzerland, thinking he would want to show his work to Steffens, Hadley packed all his manuscripts into a valise which was subsequently stolen at Gare de Lyon train station.
[10] An early story, "Up in Michigan", survived the loss because Gertrude Stein had told him it was unprintable (in part because of a seduction scene), and he had stuffed it in a drawer.
[25] The pieces he submitted to Bird were at first untitled (Pound called the submission Blank);[26] later the title in our time – from the Book of Common Prayer – was chosen.
[30] Bird designed the distinctive dust jacket – a collage of newspaper articles in four languages[31] – to highlight that the vignettes carried a sense of journalism or news.
[25] A year later Hemingway was back in Paris, where he wrote some of his best short stories and told Scott Fitzgerald that, of the new material, "Indian Camp" and "Big Two-Hearted River" were superior.
Directly afterward, he received a letter from Max Perkins of Scribner's, who had read Bird's Paris edition and thought it lacked commercial appeal, and queried whether the young writer had stories to offer to bolster the collection.
[35] When he received the contract for the book, Boni & Liveright requested that "Up in Michigan" be dropped for fear it might be censored; in response Hemingway wrote "The Battler" to replace the earlier story.
[39] Hemingway was disappointed with the publisher's marketing efforts,[40] and that December he complained to Boni & Liveright about their handling of the book, citing a lack of advertising, claiming they could have had "20,000 in sales" and that he should have requested a $1000 advance.
[46] Chapter 10 is the longest; it details a soldier's affair with a Red Cross nurse,[47] and is based on Hemingway's relationship with Agnes von Kurowsky.
The penultimate "My Old Man" concerns horse-racing in Italy and Paris, and the volume ends with the two-part Nick Adams story "Big Two-Hearted River", set in Michigan.
[51] Benson notes that all the fiction Hemingway had produced was included in the collection, that the connection between stories and vignettes is tenuous at best, and that Pound had an influence in editing the final product.
[55] Hemingway scholar Wendolyn Tetlow says that from its inception the collection was written with a rhythmic and lyrical unity reminiscent of Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" and T.S.
[56] The carefully crafted sequence continues in the 1925 edition, beginning with the first five Nick Adams stories, which are about violence and doom, empty relationships and characters lacking self-awareness.
"[54] Another Hemingway scholar, Jim Berloon, disagrees with Tetlow,[61] writing that its only unity consists of similarities in tone and style and the recurrence of the Nick Adams character.
"[61] The structure apparent in the 1924 collection of vignettes is lost in the later edition because the short stories seem to bear little if any relationship to the interchapters, shattering the carefully constructed order.
[62] The characters are transformed through circumstances and settings, where danger exists overtly, on the battlefield, or, in one case, by a chance sexual encounter in a Chicago taxi.
[67] Eliot's Waste Land motif exists throughout much of Hemingway's early fiction, but is most notable in this collection, The Sun Also Rises (1926), and A Farewell to Arms (1929).
In the story, 12-year-old Nick hides from his angry and violent father; the mother, a Christian Scientist, is distanced, withdrawn in her bedroom, reading Science and Health.
With supreme understatement he alludes to the Second Battle of Champagne, an offensive lasting from September to December 25, 1915, in which 120,000 French troops were killed in the first three weeks:[83] Everybody was drunk.
[33] As Carlos Baker describes the technique, the hard facts float above water while the supporting structure, including the symbolism, operates out of sight.
A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.Hemingway's writing style attracted attention after the release of the Parisian edition of in our time in 1924.
"[37] Reviewing for The Bookman, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote Hemingway was an "augury" of the age and that the Nick Adams stories were "temperamentally new" in American fiction.
[91] His parents, however, described the book as "filth", disturbed by the passage in "A Very Short Story" which tells of a soldier contracting gonorrhea after a sexual encounter with a sales girl in a taxicab.
[92] Bird sent five copies to them which were promptly returned, eliciting a letter from Hemingway, who complained, "I wonder what was the matter, whether the pictures were too accurate and the attitude toward life not sufficiently distorted to please who ever bought the book or what?
In 1962, when Scribner's released the paperback edition of In Our Time, it began to be taught in American universities, and by the end of the decade, the first critical study of the collection appeared.
Benson describes the collection as the author's first "major achievement";[94] Wagner-Martin as "his most striking work, both in terms of personal involvement and technical innovation.
