Because the author, Ernest Hemingway, was born on this date, July 21, in 1899, at Oak Park, Illinois. He shares a birthday with the poet Hart Crane.
"Hills Like White Elephants" was one of the stories in the collection called Men Without Women, published in 1927. There are two characters (not counting the woman who serves them drinks), identified only as "[t]he American and the girl with him," although the man later calls the woman "Jig." So, a man with a woman, but all is not well.
Most of the words in the story are the dialog between these two people as they have a couple of drinks at a train station in Spain, somewhere between Barcelona and Madrid. But there are two paragraphs devoted to describing the landscape. The first opens the story:
The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep the flies out. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.
This speaks of desolation, dirt, barren heat, a certain cheapness with flies. It's "on this side," the other side being left for the moment undescribed. The two talk for about three pages--the whole story is about five pages--and then the girl, Jig, unhappy with the conversation, gets up from the table and takes a short walk to where she can see across to the other side:
The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.
The opposite: life, fecundity, beauty. She feels the difference but "the American" is oblivious. What have they been talking about? She's pregnant, and he wants her to have an abortion. Her feelings are complex, which distinguishes them from his. Here is a portion of the talk at the station along the Ebro:
"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig," the man said. "It's not really an operation at all."
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
"I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in."
The girl did not say anything.
"I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural."
"Then what will we do afterward?"
"We'll be fine afterward. Just like we were before."
"What makes you think so?"
"That's the only thing that bothers us. It's the only thing that's made us unhappy."
It's the only thing that's made him unhappy. Her dissatisfaction, we are made to feel, is in contrast thoroughgoing. An abortion isn't a solution for her unhappiness. "That's what we do, isn't it--look at things and try new drinks," she had asked a moment before, describing their rootless and hedonistic life in the moment of her revulsion from it. And he replies, "I guess so."
The story concludes:
He picked up two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the barroom, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him.
"Do you feel better?" he asked.
"I feel fine," she said. "There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine."
I have emphasized the verbs "drank" and "looked" because I suspect Hemingway means us to connect them to--regard them as corroboration of--Jig's bitter summary of her life with "the American," traveling around looking at things and trying new drinks. The word that stands out, however, is the adverb reasonably. Hemingway spurns modifiers, and when his characters lean on them in dialog it's generally a sign of the author's moral disapproval. If you strike the adverbs--sop up the oily come-on-- from the American's pitch to Jig, what's left is his reasonable self-seeking. Everyone can understand him. It's harder to say what ails Jig. In one of her letters, the uncompromisingly devout Flannery O'Connor told a friend that Hemingway's best fictions are charged with an aching longing for what she called "Catholic fullness of life." I think that's her way of describing why it's ridiculous for the American to have supposed that, while he drank an Anis at the bar, Jig got better and now "feels fine." The dead fall of her false cheer is the last bit of desolation in this withering and despairing story.
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