(We continue with repeats of material first published by Dr. Williams Barrigar Williams on Literally Stories UK. I told my Co-Editor that he really should do a Book of Boo, who knows where a camera is better than Madonna. Both excellent images provided by DWB–LA)

by Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

Imagine spending three or four years creating dozens of short stories by hand. No computers, so you do everything with your other tools: pencils, pens, piles of paper: and the typewriter.

For rough drafts, you mostly use pencils. When the pencil gets worn down, you have to sharpen it.

When you write through them all and your entire supply gets worn down, you need to sharpen them all.

Usually you spend your time standing up as you’re writing, although sometimes you write while lying in bed.

And the paper piles up: letter after letter, word after word, phrase after phrase, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph: story after story, as you make them, all by hand.

You get blisters on your fingers and your wrist aches from the effort.

You write for years, and you create much juvenile work, work you know is juvenilia, giving you that truly uneasy, hard-to-appease feeling.

But you also feel yourself getting better. And you begin to create a few things that almost look like masterpieces eventually, and then suddenly. At least when compared to the rest of your work.

Then your wife loses everything on a train. For some reason, you kept it all in the same suitcase, plus the typed copies, and entrusted it to her. Someone stole the suitcase. Or, your wife just lost it.

Your new best friend tells you not to worry. You can now rewrite only the best stories, AND: only the ones you remember. The tragedy with the suitcase was not a tragedy at all. It was a blessing. Whatever you don’t remember was not WORTH remembering, your friend tells you. Whatever you do remember will be written much better the second time around.

The writer was Ernest, the wife was Hadley, and the friend was Ezra Pound.

Ernest Hemingway’s first book, “Three Stories & Ten Poems,” was published in Paris in 1923 in an edition of 300 copies, and was the result of the true story above. While much of the work in this book is still considered juvenilia, this is advanced juvenilia of a very interesting kind.

The poems are mostly not worth much these days. Two of them can be said to be much better than that. But the stories, while perhaps not as advanced as much of his later work, are three of Hemingway’s most memorable pieces. Because he wrote them when he was so young (early twenties, in the early 1920s), and because he later became Ernest Hemingway.

“Up in Michigan,” the first story, upends many cliches about Hemingway, because it’s told, very sympathetically, and believably, from a woman’s point of view. It’s a story of young love gone horribly wrong, as young love will do. It describes an awkward, perhaps brutal, sexual encounter between two people. At times, the prose is almost as good as Joyce in “Dubliners.”

“Out of Season,” the next piece, is a husband-and-wife story which began Hemingway’s famous “iceberg technique,” when he deliberately truncated the end, thereby making the whole much more ambiguous and believable. In this piece, you can truly feel the future Nobel Prize winner beginning to come into his own as he reinvents the beginnings and endings of stories.

The third story, “My Old Man,” is a very curious case. While this piece is clearly juvenilia in most of its aspects, it’s also good enough, and well-developed enough, to have inspired two films so far, one a full-length feature from Hollywood, and one a tv movie starring the great and under-appreciated Warren Oates.

The two poems that are worth reading these days are “Along with Youth” and “Roosevelt.” The first poem, set in northern Michigan, captures the passing of youth in a wistful, sad and true manner. The next piece is about Teddy Roosevelt, the great adventurer, who much influenced the young Hemingway.

Its ending is prophetic: “And all the legends that he started in his life / Live on and prosper, / Unhampered now by his existence.”

Wallace Stevens and Ernest Hemingway once shared a bout of angry fisticuffs on the docks of nighttime Key West, Florida. Hemingway, twenty years younger, knocked the large and formidable Stevens down. Both were wildly drunk. Stevens later admitted that he started the fight, and Hemingway finished it.

And Stevens, one of America’s greatest poets, a true heir of both Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, also later proclaimed Hemingway one of America’s greatest poets in prose. Stevens had (drunk) wanted to fight Hemingway because of how good he was. (William Carlos Williams delivered Hemingway’s first baby and claimed the big tough guy went weak in the knees as he rushed from the room.)

Hemingway kept William Shakespeare’s complete works and the King James Bible on his nightstand. He called A Farewell to Arms “my Romeo and Juliet,” and the language in The Old Man and the Sea is biblical. When we look through “Three Stories & Ten Poems,” we can enjoy seeing a young writer begin to create a style that influenced everyone afterward, as American literary critic Harold Bloom and many others have pointed out, even if they’ve never read Hemingway. Hemingway took the stripped-back, colloquial American writing style and retooled it for the twentieth century and beyond in a manner that was infused with both The Bible and Good Will.

The clean line, the spoken word, the obsession with brevity and the vivid, telling detail had been there before in American writing, but Ernie was the one who captured the modernist moment and made it universal by adding the heavyweights into the mix.

In France, Albert Camus’ The Stranger had been influenced by James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and other hardboiled American crime novels – which in turn had been influenced by Hemingway.