Book Review: Three Stories and Ten Poems was published in 1923 by a small, modernist Parisian press for expat writers, Contact Editions, whose owner took a chance on the then-unknown future Nobel Prize laureate. Just as it says in the title, this slim volume contains three stories:
"Up in Michigan" - The story that (according to Hemingway) Gertrude Stein felt was good but unpublishable (inaccrochable was her word), and so a waste of time to write. In the story a young woman receives an unbearably brutal, illusion-destroying introduction to the world and the essential nature of men at the hands of man with whom she's infatuated, despite her essential decency and innocence. It was not included in Hemingway's first story collection, In Our Time (1925), as the publisher was afraid of the obscenity laws. It wasn't published again until 1938 in the collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories.
"Out of Season" - Some consider this the "story that marks the true beginning of his mature style."
Here, a weak man, a fish out of water, allows himself to be manipulated and exploited by an illiterate drunk. Recognized as the first example of Hemingway's "iceberg theory," that what is not in the story can be understood through context. To that end he excised the original ending. The story was later included in his first story collection, In Our Time.
"My Old Man" - This one was selected for the 1923 edition of The Best Short Stories (later The Best American Short Stories, which is still published) series. A boy makes the painful discovery that his father is simply a man, with a life of his own marked by the imperfections, flaws, and weaknesses that are humanity. The piece was included in the collection, In Our Time.
One of the elements that we don't realize about these stories is how revolutionary their style was at the time. The simple, stripped down writing was still uncommon, and so was quite striking to readers even apart from all other aspects. Hemingway left out extraneous words, and even extraneous plot, believing excised portions could be discerned through the rest of the story. For modern readers, familiar with contempoary approaches, however, the writing style can seem and sound too simple, too "see Jane run."
Three Stories and Ten Poems also includes the titular poems, in which Hemingway tried to push the limits, to make them revolutionary, or at least conspicuous in a sort of bluntly realistic style. I find it interesting that like Bukowski, Hemingway's early start was as a poet as much as a writer of fiction, seemingly incompatible with his stereotypical image as a macho man's man. The poems are worth discussing. Six of the ten poems were originally published in the important Chicago modernist magazine Poetry (which in 1915 first published the then impenetrable "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and is still publishing today) in January 1923. Gertrude Stein noted that she liked the poems more than his contemporaneous fiction. Despite these commendations, Hemingway's poetry is not the basis of the reputation that led to the Nobel Prize. The poems have an always-traditionally-masculine edge, mostly straightforward without too much embellishment, using words rarely used in English-language poetry at the time (gonorrhea, whore, stomach-pump), just as "Up in Michigan" addressed a subject more directly than was usually done. Published in 1923, some of these are war poems, reminiscent (though not as well done) of the British poets of the First World War. The ten poems with my simple notes are:
"Mitraigliatrice" - There's some confusion about how to spell the title of this poem -- apparently wrong in the book but correct when it was published in Poetry. Here Hemingway compares his Corona typewriter (sent to him for his birthday by his wife, Hadley) to a machine gun. Wishful thinking, perhaps. The metaphor no doubt became more common after the invention of the electric typewriter.
"Oklahoma" - Open to interpretation: I see it as author is writing about one thing, but thinking of another to make the last line hit hard. Yes, I mean metaphor.
"Oily Weather" - The triumph of man over nature. Which you'd think Hemingway would've understood is a mirage.
"Roosevelt" - Meaning Teddy, since FDR was a ways off back then. Here Hemingway mocks the self-mythologizing, macho manly-man President. Which is a little ironic, perhaps projecting, since no one was more aware of his own image than the author.
"Captives" - Not a brilliant poem perhaps, but accurate and honest in its emotion.
"Champs D'Honneur" - My guess is that this ("Fields of Honor" in English) is Hemingway's reply after reading Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est." Owen was a great war poet.
"Riparto D'Assalto" - A war poem, good enough, mixing thoughts of soft, warm prostitutes with the misery of the war zone. Hemingway watching "shock" or "storm" troops between battles.
"Montparnasse" - A cynical comment about the ex-pat, Bohemian life on the Left Bank of Paris. Hemingway was one of those people who felt he could expound on the lives of others, not realizing how little we know about the desperation contained in the lives of others.
"Along with Youth" - A coming of age poem, as with the Nick Adams' stories or "My Old Man." Given the subject, not terrible.
"Chapter Heading" - I enjoyed this one, a good poem. Reminded me of Edna St. Vincent Millay; that's a compliment. It was selected for Best Poems of 1923 and was Hemingway's first publication in a book in the U.S.
If Hemingway's poetry speaks to you, you should seek out Complete Poems, edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis, published by University of Nebraska Press (Bison Books). It's too obvious to say, but true, that Three Stories and Ten Poems is interesting more for its historical value and as an insight into Hemingway's growth as a writer, than valuable for the lasting quality of the work. Regardless, the collection is worth the price of admission. [3★]
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