The Nick Adams Dead End

Hemingway used Nick Adams as a character for much of his early writing life, and then left him behind. 

In the Nick Adams Stories, a collection of Nick stories and pieces, some not published elsewhere, Hemingway gives some indication why he left Nick behind.

There is the beginning of the WWI novel called "Night Before Landing" where Nick is in transit on a troop ship to Europe.  Nick proved an inadequate character for his WWI novel, and was tossed aside (of course, Frederick Henry would take the torch in A Farewell to Arms).  The novel was a dead end.

The key to Hemingway's abandonment of Nick may lie in a piece called "On Writing," which is weak and disjointed, but provides clues to Hemingway's ultimate estrangement with Nick Adams.  In this story, Nick is a writer, and he muses on writing.  He says in one part:

"The only writing that was any good was what you made up, what you imagined.  That made everything come true.  Like when he wrote "My Old Man" he'd never seen a jockey killed and the next week Georges Parfement was killed at that very jump and that was the way it looked.  None if it had happened...  That was what the family could not understand.  They thought it was experience."

Here, Hemingway cleverly gives Nick Adams an experience that Hemingway had, where Nick has written the story "My Old Man" where a jockey is killed from fall from a horse.  The fall didn't happen, but later, Nick saw a real fall and a real jockey's death at the same track and it was exactly like his writing, which he imagined.  Nick's family cannot distinguish that he makes things up... they think that he is writing strictly from experience, and that hurts them since Nick Adams is embedded so much in family life.

Of course, it was Hemingway who saw the jockey really fall after writing "My Old Man."  Here he gives Nick the experience while claiming that writer's never (or should never) write about experience.  You work out the logic .  There is a fascinating circularity here, maybe even a joke, and a clue.  Nick was too close to Hemingway, both for himself and for others.  He needed to leave that character behind to get at the imagined world of pure writing.  

All the late Nick Adams pieces in The Nick Adams stories contain this deflated quality.  Hemingway had already written Nick out.  He just hadn't fully realize it until he was certain he was dead and gone and had written too many stories with him.

It Tolls for Thee

My fiction is in written English, but most of the characters speak another language (Hebrew, Yiddish, and Italian, in that order). The narratives too, are supposed to be in another language. There really are two tracks you can take in this kind of narrative sleight of hand. Either you act as if the characters expressing themselves in this language they would never speak is perfectly normal (as in many Hebrew novels and stories before Hebrew was a widely spoken language), or you in some way express that other language in English through a type of re-rendering.



I have been reading Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and he takes that latter course. The novel is in English, but everyone speaks Spanish. So Hemingway tries to create Spanish sounding English by stretching the syntax of English nearly to its breaking point, by rendering Spanish-ism into odd English phrases, like “what passes with thee?” for que pasa, a common Spanish greeting.


He also uses archaic English usages to present forms that exist in Spanish, but are gone from English, like thee and thou for the second person pronoun. It makes for strange but captivating reading. Here is a writer rendering English into Spanish forms. The results are startling and not always enjoyable; but it always gives you the impression that you have entered another world.

If the novel was written in more fluid English, the result would not have been so unusual. The very clumsiness of the language reminds the reader that this is a novel that is taking place in another, somewhat more formal language. And the English bears that imprint.


When we read For Whom the Bell Tolls we can see English both reaching into its past to create diction of current usage, as well as using an odd and foreign syntax to give the illusion of another language.  Often, this effect was criticized.  But an open reading of this novel shows what an effective technique this is and how well it does the heavy lifting of expressing another culture's values on the level of language from one tongue to another.

The Long Decline

Hemingway: The Final Years, is the final book in Reynold's five part biography of Hemingway; this volume chronicles the writer's decline. Along the way, there is another war which he both fights and covers as a correspondent, long periods where he does not write fiction, yet another failed marriage, large writing projects that would only be published posthumously, a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize, and the fall into chronic poor health, two plane crashes, depression, and alcohol.

Reynolds is careful to show how Hemingway's decisions, laid down since he was a young man in the early twenties, eventually came to haunt him as he aged (and he aged fast).

Reynolds' series of books is interesting, well-paced, meticulously researched. The lesson of the books, if we can say there is a lesson to a book, is an old one: enjoy what you have.

Hemingway was never able to enjoy the fruits of his labor or the accolades he received. Part of it was a genetic inheritance of depression improperly treated. Another part was a lack of self-examination, critical to most writing, and largely absent from Hemingway's psychological makeup. Like many of us, he just kept making the same mistakes again and again. Eventually he couldn't live with them.

The earth gets tired of being exploited

From Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa; a rare explicit statement on ecological conservation.

A continent ages once we come. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and blown away as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. A country wears out quickly unless man puts back all of his residue and that of the beasts.  When he quits using beasts and uses machines, the earth defeats him quickly.  The machine can't reproduce, nor does it fertilize the soil, and it eats what he cannot raise.  A country was made to be as we found it. 

Islands in the Stream

Islands is part of Hemingway's posthumous body of work, published in 1970 under the auspices of his last wife, Mary Hemingway. It was carved out of the UR text that Hemingway worked on after the war, which ultimately produced (or spawned) The Old Man and the Sea, The Garden of Eden, this work, and by extension, A Moveable Feast.


Islands is a compelling novel, and in terms of structure and action, the best of the posthumous works. It drags a bit on dialogue; there are times when the reader feels he has read parts already. But beyond that, the novel stands on its own as a work, and also provides glimpses into Hemingway's post-war preoccupations. There are long mediations on the nature of art, productivity, and the act of expression. There is a longing look cast backward, toward Paris, which found greater expression in A Moveable Feast.


The novel is also unremittingly dark. We get a glimpse into the Hemingway in his declining years, as his power receded, and his depression and anxiety rose.