Hemingway’s blue pencil

In Hemingway’s Art of Revision, John Beall combs diligently through the drafts of short stories that appeared in In Our Time (1925), Men Without Women (1927) and Winner Take Nothing (1933). From small cuts to extensive additions, Hemingway employed the craft he learnt primarily from Ezra Pound’s blue pencil. Along the way Beall provides insights concerning the author’s approach to gender roles, race and war.

“Cat in the Rain” provides an early example of Hemingway’s dedication to revision (and of how his women are often more interesting than his men). His early drafts contained personal references to his wife, Hadley Richardson, and to Pound, as well as to Italian fascism. Cutting such misleading material allowed him to focus instead on a young married couple living vacuous lives. He specifically expanded the dialogue between them to emphasize the woman’s emerging assertive nature. She demands a cat, while her inattentive husband wants only his book. She gets the pet she desires, yet the reader is left asking: what next?

Beall’s examination of “The Battler” and “The Killers” might raise eyebrows regarding race. He argues that Hemingway’s revisions of the first transformed the Black character Bugs (the caregiver to Ad, a punchdrunk former boxer) from a crude caricature into a confident, assertive advice-giver to a young Nick Adams. In revising, Hemingway made Bugs’s speech more formal and cut numerous (but not all) racial slurs from the drafts. As for “The Killers”, Beall also sees the Black cook Sam as an advice-giver to Nick – leave trouble alone! Beall notes that the first draft contained no epithets, but in revising Hemingway added many (though not from the mouth of Nick Adams). While Beall sees both stories as, “important portraits of racial tensions and conflicts”, one wonders about his subject’s intent, particularly in light of his more vitriolic letters to Pound (2016).

Hemingway extensively revised the Nick Adams story “A Way You’ll Never Be” by adding lengthy internal and voiced monologues on Nick’s part, depicting his struggle with disjointed memories, nightmares and deranged ramblings in the aftermath of being wounded at the Italian front. Nick’s condition – a head wound, we assume – is so troubling that his superior believes he should have been “trepanned” – a procedure that involves boring a hole in the skull to alleviate on the brain. Beall sees Nick’s ramblings as “wacky humor”, a counterpoint to the horrors of war. Are they not, however, evidence of shellshock?
While one might quibble with his verdicts on these now famous stories, one must applaud Beall for how he arrived at them. Through his extensive use of archival resources unavailable to the average reader (the Hemingway collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, among others), he deepens our understanding of the writer’s creative process.

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