Breaking up: six Hemingway stories about couples

Farewell the tranquil mind!

Farewell content.

Othello

Between 1923 and 1927 Hemingway wrote six intense, emotional and dramatic short stories, each with two or three characters, which show a man responsible for breaking up with a woman.  He began with teenage characters in Michigan and continued with young expatriates in France, Italy and Spain. The couples’ search for fun links all these stories: they go fishing, drink, travel on trains, pick up foreign languages, visit new places, move around and escape from restrictions.  In these early stories he mastered the art of crucial omissions, minimal dialogue and effective repetition.  He also emphasised the weather and setting—from storms to white hills—to suggest the source of the couples’ unease, their nagging unexplained quarrels and the sad end of their once-vital connection.

Hemingway felt guilty about leaving his first wife, Hadley—an older, matronly, unexciting, nice, “good sport”—for the younger, wealthier, petite, sophisticated and glamorous Pauline Pfeiffer.  His guilt increased his sexual pleasure with a new lover. Though he never directly described his quarrels with Hadley, except when she lost his suitcase in the Paris Gare de Lyon with the only copies of his precious manuscripts, he frequently portrayed their dissolution in his fiction.  Later on, he idealised her in A Moveable Feast.

“The End of Something” (1925) expresses the theme of all these stories.  The autobiographical hero Nick breaks with Marjorie, based on the attractive, red-haired, 17-year-old high school student and summer waitress (really and well- named Bump), who was in love with the young Hemingway.  This gloomy story is set in a logging town in northwest Michigan, where the lumber has been exhausted and the sawmill demolished.  Nick rows out on Lake Michigan to fish for rainbow trout with Marjorie: “She loved to fish.  She loved to fish with Nick” — and she loved Nick.  She senses that he’s unhappy, asks “What’s the matter?” and he evasively replies, “I don’t know.”  He doesn’t feel like eating, she coaxes him to eat, and as the moon comes up he picks a fight with her about her false claim to knowledge:

“You know everything,” Nick said.

“Oh, Nick, please cut it out!  Please, please don’t be that way!”

“I can’t help it,” Nick said. “You do.  You know everything.  That’s the trouble. . . . [But] I’ve taught you everything.”

She asks again “What’s really the matter?”  He repeats “I don’t know” and finally admits “It isn’t fun any more.  Not any of it. . . . I feel as though everything has gone to hell inside me.” . . . “Isn’t love any fun?” Marjorie said.  “No,” he said.

Marjorie leaves, Nick hears her row away and lies face down on the blanket near the fire.  His friend Bill appears, senses trouble and asks, “Have a scene?”  Nick, revealing Hemingway’s effective indirect approach, answers, “No, there wasn’t any scene.”  It’s Nick’s fault but he can’t explain his feelings, which are reflected in the empty forest and the ruined mill.

The title of “The Three-Day Blow” (1925) refers to both a storm and a psychic assault.  In this longer but less effective story, Bill reappears to explain why Nick regretfully broke with Marjorie.  (Bill calls Nick “Wemedge,” Hemingway’s comically distorted nickname.)  Before getting to the real point, they rather aimlessly discuss the weather, baseball, drinking and now-forgotten novels by George Meredith, Maurice Hewlett, Hugh Walpole and G. K. Chesterton.  After getting drunk they loosen up and become more intimate.  Bill reassures Nick that he was wise to break up with Marjorie.  If he hadn’t done so he’d be slaving away in a menial job while trying to earn enough money to get married.  And “once a man’s married he’s absolutely bitched”. Nick would also become entangled with Marjorie’s unsuitable family and horrible mother, who’d always be telling her daughter what to do and interfering with his life.

Despite this well-intentioned advice, Nick has profound doubts: “He had once had Marjorie and he had lost her.  She was gone and he had sent her away.  That was all that mattered. . . . All of a sudden everything was over.”  Confused about his real feelings and connecting his loss to the storm, he adds: “I don’t know why it was.  I couldn’t help it.  Just like when the three-day blows come now and rip all the leaves off the trees. . . . It was my fault.”  Nick consoles himself by thinking that his decision was not irrevocable.  Going outside and immersing himself in the storm, it seemed that “None of it was important now.  The wind blew it out of his head.  Still he could always go into town Saturday night.  It was a good thing to have in reserve.”  He could still change his mind, erase his guilt and recover Marjorie. Though these two stories are ostensibly about his early relations with Marjorie, they were written in the years when his love for Hadley was disintegrating.

“Out of Season” (1923) refers to illegal trout fishing and takes place in about March 1923, the year after the fascists had seized power in Italy.  That month Hadley learned she was pregnant.  The setting is Cortina in the Italian Dolomites, a town that was once part of Austria and where most people also speak German.  The drunken fishing guide Peduzzi is pleased to have captured two rich American clients.  He gets the husband to buy several rounds of drinks: fiery grappa for the men, sweet Sicilian marsala for the woman.

On the way to the river Peduzzi proudly parades them through the town, and the husband apologises to his wife for his recent, undescribed rudeness: “I’m sorry you feel so rotten, Tiny.  I’m sorry I talked the way I did at lunch.”  “It doesn’t make any difference,” she said, wounded and defensive.  “It doesn’t make any difference.  None of it makes any difference.”  The sullen wife is also annoyed that she can’t understand the guide.  He asks for a quarter litre of wine, she thinks he wants a quart; he points out his daughter (Tochter), she thinks he means doctor; and he awkwardly translates per favore (“please”) as “for a favour”.

The husband is worried that it is now forbidden to fish.  He thinks, “ ‘Everybody in the town saw us going through with these rods.  We’re probably being followed.’ . . . He felt uncomfortable and afraid that any minute a gamekeeper or a posse of citizens would come . . . from the town.”  His wife taunts him by saying, “Of course you haven’t got the guts to just go back,” though it would take more guts to fish illegally than to give up.

When the men get to the river and assemble their rods the husband, distracted by the quarrel at lunch, he realizes that he’s forgotten to bring the lead weights to sink the bait.  He tells the guide that he’ll get some lead (piombo) and fish tomorrow, even though his fishing plans will then be well known.  But he’s actually relieved that he’s not going to break the law, which would have more severe penalties under the fascist regime, and tells the disappointed and by now sobering up Peduzzi, “I may not be going [tomorrow] . . . very probably not.”  Just as “life was opening out” for the guide, it was closing in for the husband.  His inability to fish, which his wife says would not be “fun,” symbolises his inability to stay legal, to love and to remain married.

“Cat” was one of Hadley’s nicknames, and “Cat in the Rain” (1925) describes her life in the Hotel Splendide, in Rapallo on the Italian Riviera, in January 1923, the month before she became pregnant.  In the story the bored and dissatisfied American wife longs for a baby.  It is raining (as at the end of A Farewell to Arms), always disastrous weather in Hemingway’s fiction, and the wife sees a cat outside and wants to rescue it.  She goes out to find it but the cat has disappeared.  She tells her husband “I wanted it so much. . . . I don’t know why I wanted it so much.  I wanted that poor kitty.  It isn’t any fun to be a poor kitty out in the rain.”  Her husband likes her hair cut short (a major theme in The Garden of Eden), but she wants it to grow long and—like a pregnancy—“make a big knot at the back that I can feel.”

She likes the serious, dignified, solicitous Italian hotel-keeper, and the maid who gave her an umbrella and looked for the cat.  But her husband continues to read and ignores her.  To arouse his attention she makes a foolish and irritating series of demands: “I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles.  And I want it to be spring and I want to brush my [long] hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes”—though the wish for spring doesn’t fit in with her craving for material possessions.  When the husband tells her to “shut up and get something to read,” she adds to her list of desires: “Anyway, I want a cat . . . I want a cat.  I want a cat now.  If I can’t have long hair or any fun, I can have a cat.”  She hopes it will compensate for the lack of a baby and the lack of fun.  As the husband still ignores her, the maid brings her the lost cat but leaves the wife still unhappy and unfulfilled.  In a similar set of unrealistic demands, the tubercular Katherine Mansfield desperately wrote to her husband in May 1915: “Why haven’t I got a real ‘home,’ a real life?  Why haven’t I got a Chinese nurse with green trousers and two babies who rush at me and clasp my knees?—I’m not a girl—I’m a woman. I want things.  Shall I ever have them?”

“A Canary for One”(1927) is based on the Hemingways’ return from Antibes to Paris in August 1926, just before their separation.  The story describes two young Americans on a train from the French Riviera, through Cannes, Marseilles and Avignon, to the Gare de Lyon in the capital.  It is very hot in the summer, and when the wife pulls down the window shade there’s no breeze and no view of the sea, and they’re cut off from their past life on the Mediterranean coast.  En route they pass two accidents that symbolise their perilous state: a burning farmhouse with possessions spread out on a field and three wrecked cars splintered open with collapsed roofs.

They share a compartment with a talkative middle-aged American woman, who’s at first a little deaf and then really quite deaf to both words and feelings.  The domineering older woman tells them that her daughter had fallen in love with a Swiss man from a good family in Vevey on Lake Geneva.  She believed American men make the best husbands and wouldn’t allow her daughter to marry a foreigner.  She took the daughter away from him and wrecked her life by trying to save her.  The daughter reacted badly, became depressed, wouldn’t eat or sleep, wouldn’t take an interest in anything nor care about anything.  The mother has bought a caged canary in Palermo, Sicily, and is bringing it back to her daughter in Paris—a canary for one, not for a married couple.  The caged daughter,  who surely dreads the arrival of her oppressive mother, has lost her future husband but acquired a compensatory canary she doesn’t want.

The wife tells the older lady that they’d spent their honeymoon in Vevey and discovers that they’d all stayed at the same hotel, the Trois Couronnes.  In Henry James’ story “Daisy Miller” (1878), the American Frederick Winterbourne falls in love with the enchanting Daisy at the Trois Couronnes in Vevey.  She’s also courted by the attractive but careless and unsuitable Italian, Giovanelli, who later takes her to the Roman Colosseum where she contracts a fever and dies.  In both stories by James and Hemingway, the lives of the young American expatriates are ruined.  When the train reaches Paris, the couple plan “to set up separate residences”, like Hemingway and Hadley, and get divorced.  So, ironically, American men do not make the best husbands.  The daughter’s potential marriage and the couple’s actual marriage are both wrecked.

“Hills Like White Elephants” (1927), one of Hemingway’s greatest and most subtle stories, shows his unsentimental compassion for a woman trapped between unwilling compliance and cruel rejection.  White elephants don’t really exist and symbolise an unwanted burden, like the woman’s pregnancy.  The unmarried couple are pointlessly stranded in the empty Ebro (embryo) valley—where there’s nothing to do nor see and no reason for them to be there—waiting for the train between Barcelona and Madrid.  The imaginative woman states that the hills “look like white elephants,” the literal-minded man contradicts her with “I’ve never seen one.”  They can drink the liquorice-tasting Anis del Toro either clear, like the woman’s view, or cloudy (with water) like the man’s.  She sums up her boredom with their itinerant life when she says, “That’s all we do, isn’t it—look at things and try new drinks?”

Suddenly, they shift to the real but never-mentioned subject as the man tries to persuade the woman to have an abortion: “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig . . . It’s really not an operation at all. . . . I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig.  It’s really not anything.  It’s just to let the air in” to the uterus, which leads to contractions and expels the fetus.  “And you think then we’ll be all right and be happy?”  “I know we will.  You don’t have to be afraid.  I’ve known lots of people that have done it.”  She bitterly and ironically responds, “And so have I. . . . And afterward they were all so happy.”  More aware of the dangers than he is, she’s frightened of killing the foetus and hurting herself.  He keeps badgering her and wearing down her clear-minded resistance until she finally surrenders and repeats “I don’t care about me.”

Her dissociation of self and surrender of individuality comes from a distinguished literary tradition.  In Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) Ishmael says, “take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.”  In Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) the self-punishing anti-hero states, as if his inner organs don’t belong to him, “So my liver hurts?  Good, let it hurt even more!”  Both reject their own physical being.  Arthur Rimbaud’s influential perception, “I is another” (1871) is literally true of the pregnant woman.  She’s the mother herself and has another being inside her.  In Conrad’s Victory (1915) Lena similarly submits, merges her identity with Heyst’s and tells him, “if you were to stop thinking of me I shouldn’t be in the world at all! . . . I can only be what you think I am.”  In 1924 the dying Franz Kafka also rejected his sick body and paradoxically told his doctor: “Kill me or else you are a murderer.”  In Wyndham Lewis’ The Vulgar Streak (1941) Vincent Penhale hangs himself and leaves an angry note: “Whoever finds this body, may do what they like with it.  I don’t want it.”  Finally, in A Farewell to Arms (1929) Catherine Barkley abjectly surrenders her selfhood as well as her body and tells her lover, “I want what you want.  There isn’t any me any more. . . . I’m you.  Don’t make up a separate me.”  Hemingway’s ideal wife has no identity without him.

In the one positive moment in “Hills Like White Elephants”, the woman looks at the natural world around her as “the shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.”  This scene echoes Psalm 121: “I lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” But no help comes to the woman.  Even after she agrees to have the operation, the man fears she might change her mind and continues to hound her.  Finally, echoing King Lear’s agonised cry when he learns that Cordelia is dead, “Never, never, never, never, never,” the woman begs him—in Hemingway’s most effective and increasingly frantic and pitiful repetition—“Would you please, please, please, please, please, please, please stop talking?”  If he doesn’t shut up, she threatens to scream.

Throughout the story the man always lies, the woman is always defensively ironic.  It ends when she unconvincingly reassures him, “I feel fine. . . . There’s nothing wrong with me.  I feel fine,” though she feels terrible and everything is wrong with her.  She wants marriage and a home; he wants to continue their expatriate wandering.  She’ll probably submit to the abortion in order to please the man, but since he’s selfishly forced her to do this, she can never really love him.  Hemingway sympathised with the woman’s point of view, criticised the man’s behaviour and blamed him for their bitter quarrel.

These powerful stories express the anguish Hemingway felt on leaving Hadley.  Though he married four times and had three sons, he always feared that marriage and children would compromise rather than confirm his masculinity, interfere with his writing and ruin his life.

Jeffrey Meyers has published Hemingway: The Critical Heritage, Hemingway: A Biography and Hemingway: Life into Art as well as 90 essays about him.  His 45 Ways to Look at Hemingway will appear in July 2025.

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