[In the following essay, Cohen contrasts the treatment of a central female character in an unpublished draft entitled “Exodus” against its published version within In Our Time.]

Readers of Hemingway's early work know that, contrary to the claims of Hemingphobes, it often portrays women sympathetically in “unhappily-ever-after” love affairs. “Hills Like White Elephants,” “Out of Season” and “Cat in the Rain” feature oafish, manipulative, or indifferent men oblivious to their frustrated, sometimes desperate mates. In “Up in Michigan,” Hemingway even violates a taboo of Fiction Writing 101 by writing partly from the woman's point of view: Far more vividly than it depicts Jim Gilmore's lust, the story evokes Liz Coates's confused arousal, shock at Jim's brutality and bleak despair afterwards¹

The interchapters of In Our Time, on the other hand, pointedly ignore women. The worlds illumined in their sudden flashes—war, crime, politics, and bullfighting—are distinctly male and violent, coolly rendered, many of them, by anonymous narrators in objective points of view. Women appear in only two chapters: a vestigial queen dips a rose bush in “L'Envoi” (the concluding chapter) and “There was a woman having a kid” during the torturous evacuation of Greek civilians from Eastern Thrace (Chapter II)² Neither reference presents the adult woman's point of view; in fact, the woman “having a kid” is the object of a little girl's horror, as she cries and holds a blanket over the birthing mother, “[s]cared sick looking at it.” Hemingway so objectifies this scene that he even omits the relationship between girl and woman. In his journalistic version, “A Silent Ghastly Procession,” the girl was “her little daughter.” (By-Line 51-52)

This objectification typifies the emotionally detached narrations of suffering and violence in several interchapters (e.g., the execution of the cabinet ministers in Chapter V), but Hemingway did not originally plan to narrate Chapter II this way. One unpublished draft in the John F. Kennedy Library, entitled “Exodus,” presents the evacuation from the perspective of the woman in childbirth, whom Hemingway names “Helene.”³

Helene rides in the back of a cart, nauseous and hurting, and we ride with her, experiencing the wagon's lurching, jarringly slow progress. So rigorously does Hemingway restrict narrative perspective here, that the first paragraph mostly describes what Helene sees, looking straight ahead: the bobbing, manure-matted rump of the camel pulling the cart.⁴ Only the last sentence of this paragraph refers to the cart's driver, hunched on the front seat in the dripping rain.

The sight and, presumably, smell of the camel's bobbing backside, and the jolting ride intensify Helene's nausea. But she is also in pain—labor pains that have resumed and are sharp enough to make her grip the side of the cart. She is dizzy as well: the roadside trees whirl. With the same unblinking stare at the sordid that runs through the interchapters, the narrative does not merely tell us that Helene vomits over the side of the cart, but describes the act in sickening detail, the vomit belching and dribbling from her, chunks of it clinging to the wheel hubs. Momentarily relieved, she settles back against the grain sacks and looks at a chicken-bedecked old man walking alongside the cart. The draft, here handwritten, ends as another labor pain comes on and Helene braces herself to bear it: eyes shut and feet pressed against a table in the cart.

The Helene draft contrasts sharply with the view of the Greek retreat that Hemingway published as Chapter II. Where that version encompasses the entire thirty miles of the evacuation in an objective voice, this one is limited to Helene's view and sensations. Detachment governs the published version; empathy for Helene's agony imbues this one. Still, the Helene version would not have been out of place among vignettes that portray, in the same tightly focused perspective, a wounded soldier (Chapter VI) and a gored bullfighter (Chapter XIV). All three present, in third person, the sensations and perceptions of a single point of view character.

The theme of difficult childbirth is present in Hemingway's earliest work. Imagined well before his first wife Hadley's pregnancy,⁵ the theme of difficult labor in “Exodus” develops Liz's physical and emotional pain from sex in “Up from Michigan” and anticipates the primitive and excruciating childbirth in “Indian Camp.” The son of a doctor who had specialized in obstetrics, Hemingway intuitively recognized the fictional potential of this life-and-death subject.⁶ Yet, Helene's painful birthing may also have had more immediate autobiographical links. In the long passage (subsequently titled “On Writing”) that Hemingway deleted from “Big Two-Hearted River,” Nick recalls that “He'd seen a woman have a baby on the road to Karagatch and tried to help her” (The Nick Adams Stories 238). It may not have been the woman's daughter, therefore, who was “Scared sick looking at it,” but the narrator recalling his own fear.

In sum, the subjective and limited perspective of the Helene version would not in itself have consigned this draft to Hemingway's unpublished papers. Other interchapters are equally “personal,” and limited in perspective. Nor would its physically repulsive content have excluded it: vomit, excrement, and, of course, blood appear in several interchapters of In Our Time. Though its female protagonist would make it atypical, the Helene version would have provided a significant counterbalance to the male perspectives of other chapters. What seems more off-key in this version, though, is its insistently allegorical allusions: the biblical title comparing the Greeks leaving Eastern Thrace to the Jews exiting Egypt; the woman's name representing the Hellenic people (as well as being a personal favorite of the author's); and perhaps even Helene's resemblance to Mary, journeying to avoid the Romans. These not-too-subtle allusions to religious stories, epic journeys, and momentous births jar against the grimy contemporaneity of war, crime, politics, and even bullfighting in “In Our Time”

Notes

1. Hemingway planned to include this sympathetic portrayal of a working woman in the 1925 In Our Time published by Liveright, which would have given it far wider exposure than its first appearance in the small edition, Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923). Liveright, however, was disturbed by the story's graphic sexuality and asked that it be removed. He may also have been troubled by its frank depiction of a woman's sexual desire.

2. Based on the first edition (New York: Liveright, 1925). Earlier and later versions of In Our Time contain more female characters. In the earlier in our time (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1924), chapter 10 (which became “A Very Short Story” in the 1925 In Our Time) prominently and caustically features “Ag” as the unfaithful nurse in an anti-romantic tale. And in “On the Quai at Smyrna,” which introduces the Scribner's editions beginning in 1930, pregnancy tellingly cleaves to death, as the Greek women, waiting to be evacuated from the oncoming Turks, will not give up their dead babies.

3. Folder 701, Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, ts and ms.

4. Cf., the wounded Nick's similarly restricted view, looking “straight ahead,” in Chapter VI.

5. Hemingway probably wrote this version while he was covering the evacuation in November 1922. The reverse side of the draft contains notes on the political conference that led to the evacuation and on some of its participants (Kemal Pasha, Lord Harrington), as well as snappy openers Hemingway planned to use in his dispatches.

6. “I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death….” (DIA [Death in the Afternoon] 2–3)

Works Cited

Hemingway, Ernest. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades. Ed. William White. New York: Scribner's, 1967.

———. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner's, 1932.

———. “Exodus.: Unpublished draft. Folder 702. The Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Library. Boston, MA.

———. in our time. Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1924.

———. In Our Time. New York: Liveright 1925; Scribner's 1930.