Back in 2013-14, I did a series of posts on the stories in James Joyce's Dubliners, one of my favorite books. Here is a link to the one on "Araby," about a young boy who has an unpleasant epiphany when he goes to buy a gift for a girl he likes at a bazaar. I enjoyed that exercise and think I will start a series like it, except that the subjects will be a continuous miscellany of stories I like by American authors. First is going to be Hemingway's "Indian Camp." It can be read online here, if you are interested. It's only about 1500 words long.
"Indian Camp" was the first story in Hemingway's first collection, In Our Time, published in 1925, the year he turned 26. Possibly it is misleading to say "collection," for the stories in the book are preceded by brief vignettes and the successive headings "Chapter I," "Chapter II," "Chapter III," etc. So Hemingway did not think of the book as a collection of unrelated stories. In this respect, In Our Time resembles Dubliners, which had been published in 1914--Hemingway admired it and seems to have studied it carefully. The stories in Joyce's book are about ordinary Dubliners who keep getting a little older as the book progresses. "Araby," for example, is the third story, and the main character is on the brink of adolescence. In the last story, "The Dead," the main character, Gabriel Conroy, is middle-aged. In In Our Time, we have not a succession of characters but a single character, Nick Adams, who is a little older in each story in which he appears. (He doesn't appear in all of them.) "Indian Camp," then, is the story for Chapter I in the first edition of In Our Time. It's the first Nick Adams story, both with respect to the boy's age (one guesses around 10) and date of composition (1923 or 1924--the above picture is contemporaneous, as it's Hemingway's passport photo for 1923).
Here's what happens in the story:
Nick is on a fishing trip with his father, who is a physician, and his father's brother, George. They camp on the shore of the lake they fish. On the other side of the lake is an Indian camp. As the story opens, two Indians have come in row boats in the night to summon Dr Adams. A woman at the camp has been in labor for two days, unable to deliver her baby, which is in the breech position. Nick, his father, and uncle cross the lake in row boats with the Indians. Here is the paragraph in which Hemingway describes their entry to the camp:
Inside on a wooden bunk lay a young Indian woman. She had been trying to have her baby for two days. All the old women in the camp had been helping her. The men had moved off up the road to sit in the dark and smoke out of range of the noise she made. She screamed just as Nick and the two Indians followed his father and Uncle George into the shanty. She lay in the lower bunk, very big under a quilt. Her head was turned to one side. In the upper bunk was her husband. He had cut his foot very badly with an axe three days before. He was smoking a pipe. The room smelled very bad.
Unless I've miscounted, eleven sentences, 121 words, 142 syllables, and one comma. Every word is one or two syllables but for "Indian," which occurs twice. George and Nick are pressed into service as assistants and Dr Adams addresses successfully the medical crisis. In the immediate aftermath, he is giddy and tells his brother that to have performed a C-section with a jack-knife and then sewed up the incision with fishing line is "one for the medical journals." The improvised operation has been accomplished without the aid of an anaesthetic. Before leaving, Dr Adams checks on the husband in the upper bunk. The man lies on the edge of the bed away from the open part of the room, face to the wall. When the doctor lifts his lamp, Nick happens to be standing right where he can see that the sagging part of the bed is full of pooling blood and that the man has with a razor slit his throat from ear to ear, nearly decapitating himself. He evidently could not endure his wife's suffering.
Hemingway's spare narration somehow amplifies the horror of the scene. In the muted conclusion, Nick and his father are in the row boat again, headed back across the lake. Nick asks questions, like whether suicide is very common and whether some women do it, too, and his father answers. The sun is just coming up, and there is a chill in the air that contrasts with the warmth of the water when Nick trails his hand in it. In another detail, a fish jumps, forming a circle in the water. It is as if the nightmare is receding as father and son row away from the fallen world back into Eden. This sense seems consistent, perhaps, with the description of the original night crossing to the Indian camp, when Nick had leaned back in the boat, his father's arm around him, as the Indian rowed them through the mist on the lake. We might say that the structure of the story is a framed narrative--the frames being the two trips across the lake by boat--and that its "point" is the effect of the inner story on the approximately 10-year-old Nick Adams. The last sentence is:
In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, [Nick] felt quite sure that he would never die.
The Indian camp experience is too awful to be assimilated and accepted.
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