A Moveable Fast

THE NICK ADAMS STORIES

by ERNEST HEMINGWAY 268 pages. Scribners. $7.95.

One of the things that Ernest Hemingway taught a generation of imitators was that the way to write good stories is to leave things out. Not just the bad bits, but good ones, so that what remains bears an extraordinary tension. His leaving out extended to entire manuscripts, and when he shot himself in 1961, leaving out the remainder of his life, his trunk was full of finished work which he had not allowed to be published. Since then his literary executors have been busy putting things back in. However reverent their motives, what they do is mostly mischief.

The latest example is the addition to the familiar Nick Adams stories of 100 pages of previously unpublished fragments. There can be no pretense that the fragments are anything but rejects. Judged against the author's other work, none are much better than mediocre, and most are worse than that. They were written, and then written off, at the beginning of Hemingway's career. If he had wanted to change his mind about them, he had 30 years or more to do so. The legitimate Nick Adams stories were written and cut ruthlessly according to the leaving-out principle. The technique worked. Nick may be Hemingway's alter ego, but readers know very little about him. It is not always clear, in fact, what the author feels about him. Important stretches are missing from his life. But those empty spaces are haunted; they resonate.

That, of course, is what makes Big Two-Hearted River one of the best of Hemingway's stories. What has moved Nick to make a fishing trip, alone, in Michigan country he has not seen for years, is never hinted at. The standard suggestion, a reasonable one, is that he has been to war. Perhaps, on the other hand, he has merely been living a brackish city life. No matter. Nick fishes deliberately, and deliberately does not think of where he has been, and the story is fine.

Chinking the empty spaces in Nick's life with torn-off bits of prose, arranged chronologically so as to provide more information about him, is not an improvement. The resonance is dulled. We are given, for example, three pages about young Nick's nighttime fears, which Hemingway cut from the beginning of Indian Camp. There is a mawkish 63-page shard of an unfinishable novel, telling how the teen-aged Nick and his kid sister hide in the woods to escape a couple of improbably Snopesian game wardens. (In his Hemingway biography Carlos Baker very properly deals with the incident in a few paragraphs. Apparently Ernest had killed some game out of season, and, considering himself to be in hideous trouble, spent some time skulking through the forest in romantic despair. No one pursued him.)

The only passable new work offered here is a twelve-page story called Summer People. It contains a fairly explicit lovemaking scene, and Hemingway may have held it back from publication rather than submit to censorship. But he could have published the story after, say, 1950, and he chose not to. Presumably he thought it was not worth the trouble.

The book does have one justification. It is a fine excuse to read the old stories again. They are what they were. Indian Camp is good, but the suicide that ends it is phony. The Killers, though much anthologized, is merely muscle flexing. The tiny, less than 200-word story in which Nick lies wounded against the wall of the Italian church is superb. So is A Way You'll Never Be.

So is Big Two-Hearted River, for that matter. The two brief skiing stories are very good; almost no one writes well about skiing.

Let it go at that. Dead writers and their wastebaskets should be left in peace. "John Skow

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