The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ernest Hemingway · fourteen stories, in the order Hemingway set, read as one book · Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1927 · scored on Hemingway’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
A book of stories built on omission; the subject of each left out and carried by what remains, under one stance toward loss
Mythos
The bullfight as sacrificial rite and the man undefeated in his refusal; death arriving by appointment to a man who will not run; the Passion in a wineshop; the soul that fears to leave the body in sleep
Phase
The years after the war: a hospital in Italy, a station in Spain, a bullring in Madrid, a lunch-room in Illinois, a train to Paris, a fascist Italy, a woodshed through a winter, a sleepless night at the front
Presentation
Fiction; fourteen stories, six told in the first person, five in the third, two almost wholly in dialogue, and one, “To-day Is Friday”, a short play
Register
The plain sentence; repetition that builds pressure; dialogue cut until what is not said is audible; comedy timed against dread
Scale
A handful of men and couples in each story; across the book war, sport, crime, marriage, childhood, the state, death and the sacred, each at the point of loss
Governing Proposition
Fourteen stories of men cut off from what would console them, a wife, a home, a faith, the use of a hand, a working body: an aging matador who will not quit, a major whose young wife has died, a man talking a girl toward an operation at a station in Spain, a boxer in a fixed fight, a big man lying on his bed who will not run from the gunmen who have come for him. No story in the book is about a man and a woman at ease together, and the title describes the contents rather than laying a theme on them. The wager of the book is that a story can carry its subject in what it leaves out, and that the discipline with which these men meet loss, the only dignity left to them, can be shown at the same stroke as a refusal to speak that leaves them, and the women near them, alone.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Charles Scribner’s Sons published the book in New York in 1927. It gathers fourteen stories in an order Hemingway set: “The Undefeated”, “In Another Country”, “Hills Like White Elephants”, “The Killers”, “Che Ti Dice La Patria?”, “Fifty Grand”, “A Simple Enquiry”, “Ten Indians”, “A Canary for One”, “An Alpine Idyll”, “A Pursuit Race”, “To-day Is Friday”, “Banal Story” and “Now I Lay Me”. Several had appeared first in magazines and small presses; the book is their first gathering in this order, and it is the book of 1927 that is weighed here, not the stories as later collected with others.
Thirteen of the fourteen are in prose; “To-day Is Friday” is a short play. Six are told in the first person and five in the third, and two, “Hills Like White Elephants” and “The Killers”, are almost wholly dialogue. Nine are set in Europe, in Spain, Italy, France and Austria, one in Jerusalem and four in America. Nick Adams is named or implied in “The Killers”, “Ten Indians” and “Now I Lay Me”, but the book is not his: there are no interchapters, and nothing binds the stories but their order and their temper.
The title is a description. No story in the book is about a man and a woman at ease together. Where a woman appears, a parting is in train, as in “Hills” and “A Canary for One”; has happened, as in “In Another Country” and “Ten Indians”; or has ended in death, as in “An Alpine Idyll”. The rest are about men among men: soldiers, bullfighters, boxers, gunmen, Roman soldiers in a wineshop. What the book holds is men cut off from what would console them, and how they carry it.
Movement II
The book opens in the bullring. Manuel, an aging matador just out of hospital, takes a nocturnal fight for little money. The story gives the fight move by move, the faena sustained over a long action without slackening, and Manuel is gored and goes on. On the operating table, afterwards, he is told that his coleta will not be cut: Zurito has promised it.
It builds a myth, and it builds it whole. The bullfight is a sacrificial rite, and the old matador who will not yield is the undefeated man of the title, the hero whose victory is in the refusal, carried to the table. The book honours that refusal and shows it, in the same stroke, as a kind of stupidity. That doubleness is the book’s disclosure in small: the discipline is the only dignity these men have, and it is also what they cannot see past.
Sport returns in “Fifty Grand”, where the trade is boxing and the fight is fixed. Here sport is labour and money. Between the two, near both ends of the first half of the book, the world of the ring and the purse stands as one of the orders the book holds: work done with the body, for money, with loss the likely end.
Movement III
In “Hills Like White Elephants” a man and a girl wait at a station in Spain. They drink beer and then anise; there is a bead curtain; the hills across the valley are likened to white elephants, and the figure is the unwanted gift. He talks. “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig.” The operation is never named. Nearly all readers take it to be an abortion; the text never says so. The story is almost wholly dialogue, the narrator reduced to stage directions, and in that form the man’s reasonableness is the violence.
Told from inside Jig, or with the operation named, the story would know what she feels. Told as it is, it knows that the two cannot say what the story is about, and that his words are the instrument of the pressure. The surface is held flat for pages, and the one break in it is her plea that he stop talking, the word “please” run over and over. The bags are carried to the far side of the station. At the close she says: “I feel fine.” Whether that is surrender, defiance or irony, and whether she will go through with it, readers have argued for ninety-nine years.
“A Canary for One” is the other couple. A husband and wife are on a train, and the story ends on its last sentence: they are returning to Paris “to set up separate residences”. The parting is in train in one story and made in the other, and both are returned to for what they leave unsaid. The method of omission is pushed farthest in “Hills”, and it was a wager in 1927: a story whose subject is not in it.
Movement IV
“The door of Henry’s lunch-room opened and two men came in.” They wear derby hats. In the lunch-room in Summit, Illinois, the cook and Nick are tied up in the kitchen, and the two men wait to kill Ole Andreson at six o’clock. The story never says why he is to die. The gunmen are funny, their banter timed exactly against the counter, and the comedy is the horror: evil known as manner, from no one’s mind, almost entirely in dialogue.
Ole Andreson, the big man upstairs, lies on his bed facing the wall. He will not run. The story builds fate as myth: death arriving by appointment, the condemned man who knows and does not move, and the boy who watches and then leaves town. Ole facing the wall is the code with nothing left in it. Read as a parable of the code, as Nick’s initiation and as a sketch of the gangland economy, the story has been remade on film, and the hard-boiled crime story and the film noir took the gunmen’s manner from it.
Nick is younger in “Ten Indians”, where his father tells him he saw his Indian girl in the woods with another boy: a childhood and a first betrayal. The state enters in “Che Ti Dice La Patria?”, the fascist Italy of 1927. And in “An Alpine Idyll” death and the body are held in one image: a peasant has hung a lantern from his dead wife’s mouth in the woodshed through a winter. The book reaches these orders, the family, the state, the dead, only at their breaking.
Movement V
“In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.” So “In Another Country” opens, with a cadence of cold and wind and game hung outside the shops, and the war stays outside the hospital, with its machines. The major there, whose young wife has died, says that a man “must not marry”, because “he should not place himself in a position to lose”. Then he stands looking out of the window, a man who will not be resigned. The narrator knows that he is not one of the hawks, and the first person is his confession.
The war returns at the close. “Now I Lay Me” takes its title from a child’s prayer, and its night from a soldier who cannot sleep because he fears his soul will leave his body. He says prayers for everyone he has known, and fishes remembered trout streams in the dark, while the silkworms eat. Before it come the slighter pieces: “A Pursuit Race”, of addiction, its manner close to mannerism; “To-day Is Friday”, three Roman soldiers drinking after the Crucifixion, whose single turn, “He was pretty good in there today”, does not justify its form; and “Banal Story”, a page of mockery of a magazine’s prose ending on Maera’s death.
The book is weighed as a book, and those pieces are charged to it. Its best stories, “Hills Like White Elephants”, “The Killers” and “In Another Country”, are in nearly every anthology of the American story and among the most taught in English, and they are more often read among the collected stories than here. Read whole, it holds war, sport, crime, marriage, childhood, the state, death, the sacred and addiction under one law: loss comes, it cannot be undone or spoken of, and what a man has left is how he carries it. The method of In Our Time is perfected here, and the stories through which it travelled into the anthology, the seminar and the crime film are mostly in this book.
Act III · The Twelve
Within the best stories the subtractive test finds almost nothing. “Hills Like White Elephants” is a few pages, and every exchange turns the screw: the beer, the anise, the bead curtain, the bags carried to the far side of the station. “The Killers” spends nothing between the door opening and Nick’s decision to leave town; “In Another Country” is built of the machines, the hawks and the major’s grief, each load-bearing. Across the book the test bites, and harder than in a book bound by interchapters. “Banal Story”, a page of mockery ending on Maera’s death, could go without loss; “To-day Is Friday” is a sketch whose single turn does not justify its form; “A Pursuit Race” and “A Simple Enquiry” are slighter than their neighbours. Four of fourteen removable: that sets the axis.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: men cut off from what would console them meet loss with a discipline that is the only dignity left to them, and the discipline is also a refusal to speak, which leaves the women in the stories, and the men, alone. The book shows both sides. The major in “In Another Country”, whose young wife has died, says a man “must not marry” because “he should not place himself in a position to lose”: the code stated as a wound. Manuel in “The Undefeated” will not quit, and the book honours it and shows it as a kind of stupidity. In “Hills” the man’s reasonableness is the violence. Held below the top because what is disclosed is one stance and its cost, not a society, and the women are seen only from outside.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Elevation is cold and frequent. “The Undefeated” carries it longest: an aging matador, out of hospital, takes a nocturnal fight for little money, is gored and goes on, and on the operating table is told his coleta will not be cut. “The Killers” reaches dread without a raised voice: two men in derby hats in a lunch-room, the cook and Nick tied up in the kitchen, and the big man upstairs who will not run. “In Another Country” rises at the major’s grief, the man who will not be resigned looking out of the window. “Now I Lay Me” makes a sleepless night its own height, and “Hills” holds terror under small talk. What holds the axis is that a third of the book does not rise: “Che Ti Dice La Patria?”, “A Pursuit Race”, “Banal Story” and “To-day Is Friday”.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Myth is built in two stories and evoked in several. “The Undefeated” builds it: the bullfight is a sacrificial rite, and the old matador who will not yield is the undefeated man of the title, the hero whose victory is in the refusal, carried to the table. “The Killers” builds fate: death arrives by appointment at six o’clock, the condemned man knows and does not run, and the boy who watches leaves home. Elsewhere the deep patterns are named or glanced at. “To-day Is Friday” brings the Passion into a wineshop and does little with it. “Now I Lay Me” takes its title from a child’s prayer and its matter from the soul that fears to leave the body in sleep, real and quiet. The white elephant of “Hills” is a figure, the unwanted gift, not a myth. Load-bearing in two stories and in the stance of the whole, and no more.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is the magazine story of O. Henry and the Saturday Evening Post with its plotted turn, Kipling, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Gertrude Stein’s repetitions, with Turgenev and Chekhov behind them. The departure is the theory of omission, by which the story’s subject is left out and carried by what remains: “Hills” never names the operation, “The Killers” never says why Ole Andreson is to die, and “In Another Country” lets the war stay outside the hospital. “Hills” pushes it farthest, a story almost wholly in dialogue with the narrator reduced to stage directions, and in 1927 that was a wager, staked in the paying magazines. Held at the line rather than above it because In Our Time, two years before, had already made the turn; this book perfects and widens it.
Score: 8.5 / 10
In the best stories the form is the knowledge. “Hills” told from inside Jig, or with the operation named, would know what she feels; told as it is, it knows that the two cannot say what the story is about, and that the man’s words are the instrument of the pressure. “The Killers”, told almost entirely in dialogue and from no one’s mind, knows evil as manner: the gunmen are funny, and the comedy is the horror. “In Another Country” is told in the first person by a narrator who knows he is not one of the hawks, and the first person is the confession. As a book the form is looser. The stories are not bound by interchapters, and the order, sport near both ends of the first half and the war returning at the close, is a sequence, not an argument. The stories’ forms stand at the top; the book’s at less.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Ninety-nine years of return are the evidence. “Hills Like White Elephants” is among the most taught and argued stories in English, and its questions stay open: whether the operation is an abortion (nearly all readers say yes, the text never does); whether Jig decides to go through with it; whether “I feel fine” at the close is surrender, defiance or irony; what the two sides of the valley mean. “The Killers” has been read as a parable of the code, as a story of Nick’s initiation and as a sketch of the gangland economy, and it has been remade on film. “In Another Country” keeps opening on its first sentence, and “Now I Lay Me” and “A Canary for One” are returned to for what they leave unsaid. Held below the summit because the yield is concentrated in perhaps six stories, and the rest are read for those.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is the short story in English of the 1920s, and, through translation, the short story in the European languages after it. The intrinsic force: the book established that a story could carry its subject in omission and dialogue, and “Hills” and “The Killers” became the standard demonstrations of the method. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is very wide. The hard-boiled crime story and the film noir took the gunmen’s manner from “The Killers”; the minimal story of Raymond Carver and those after him descends from “Hills”; the writing seminar has taught the method of omission from these pages for decades. Held below the top because the turn had been made in In Our Time, and the reach of the method is shared with that book and with The Sun Also Rises; but the pieces through which it travelled are mostly here.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over ninety-nine years and weighed as such: form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole as published, in print throughout, with nothing lost; form and fabric take no charge. Presence is wide for the stories and narrower for the book. “Hills”, “The Killers” and “In Another Country” are in nearly every anthology of the American story and are widely translated, but they are more often read among the collected stories than in this book as a book. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, the manners of the 1920s, the gangsters of Prohibition, the Italy of 1927 in “Che Ti Dice La Patria?”, but that is matter, and the stories have outlived it. The figure stands at the foot of what this span earns, for a book whose presence runs through its parts.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Hemingway’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the plain sentence, the repetition that builds pressure, and dialogue cut until what is not said is audible. “Hills” is the summit of the method: the girl’s plea that he stop talking, the word “please” run over and over, is the one break in a surface held flat for pages. “The Killers” times its comedy exactly, the gunmen’s banter against the counter. “The Undefeated” sustains a long action, the faena given move by move, without slackening. “In Another Country” opens with a cadence of cold and wind and game hung outside the shops that sets the whole story’s register. Charged for the slack pieces: “Banal Story” is a joke at the expense of another prose, “To-day Is Friday” a sketch in dialect, and in “A Pursuit Race” the manner comes close to mannerism.
Score: 8.9 / 10
One law governs most of the book: loss comes, it cannot be undone or spoken of, and what a man has left is how he carries it. Take the two most distant elements, the bullring in Madrid in “The Undefeated” and the lunch-room in Summit, Illinois, in “The Killers”. They obey the law: Manuel will not quit, Ole will not run, and neither has a choice that would save him. The couple on the train in “A Canary for One”, going back to Paris “to set up separate residences”, and the soldier who cannot sleep in “Now I Lay Me” obey it too. Charged on two counts. “Banal Story” and “To-day Is Friday” step outside the law into satire and pastiche. And the law is narrow, one stance applied across a range of settings, so that some of the coherence is that of a single temper rather than a wide world under one physics.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on what one book of fourteen stories holds, and it holds more than its size suggests. War and the wounded, in three stories. Sport as labour and money: the bullfighter’s trade, the boxer’s fixed fight in “Fifty Grand”. Crime and its economy. Marriage and its end. Childhood and a first betrayal in “Ten Indians”. The state, in the fascist Italy of “Che Ti Dice La Patria?”. Death and the body in “An Alpine Idyll”. The sacred, in the Passion and the child’s prayer. Addiction in “A Pursuit Race”. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is that the orders are held through one stance rather than joined in one structure, and the family and society are seen only at their breaking. A low mark on a book of stories describes what it joins, not its length.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, The Made at 8.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8. Ninety-nine years with the text whole and in print and its best stories continuously read; a command of the plain sentence and of dialogue cut until what is not said is audible, at its summit in “Hills Like White Elephants”; and the stories, “Hills” and “The Killers” first, through which the method of omission travelled into the anthology, the writing seminar, the hard-boiled story and the film noir.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: war, sport, crime, marriage, childhood, the state, death, the sacred and addiction are all present, held through one stance rather than joined in one structure, with family and society seen only at their breaking. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.0: four of fourteen pieces could be lost without a fact the book needs. Then The Archetypal Deep at 8.2: myth built in two stories and evoked in the rest.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.9, The Living Form at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 falls three tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.5, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Ernest Hemingway’s Men Without Women, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, in 1927; scored as that book, the fourteen stories in the order Hemingway set, read as one work. The earlier appearances of single stories in magazines and small presses, and their later places in The First Forty-Nine (1938) and the complete stories, are context, not part of the work. No text of the book was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Hemingway’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the opening of “The Killers”, the first sentence of “In Another Country” and two phrases of the major’s there, two lines from “Hills Like White Elephants”, the close of “A Canary for One” and a line from “To-day Is Friday”. The length of the book and of each story, the first periodical publication of each story, the number of times the word “please” is spoken in “Hills”, the particular films made of “The Killers” and whether Nick Adams is the narrator of “In Another Country” are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. Citations are by story.