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Indian Camp

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front face view of dark-haired, dark-eyed young man dressed in shirt, tie and jacket
Hemingway's 1923 passport photo taken a year before the publication of "Indian Camp"

"Indian Camp" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. The story was first published in 1924 in Ford Madox Ford's literary magazine transatlantic review in Paris, and republished by Boni & Liveright in 1925 in the American edition of Hemingway's first volume of short stories In Our Time. "Indian Camp" is the first of Hemingway's stories to feature the semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams—a child in this story—which is told from his point-of-view.

In the story, Nick Adams' father, a country doctor, has been summoned to an Indian camp to deliver a baby, with Nick and his uncle going along with him. At the camp, the father is forced to perform an emergency caesarean section using a jack-knife, with Nick as his assistant. Afterward, the woman's husband is discovered dead, having fatally slit his throat during the operation. The story is important because it shows the emergence of Hemingway's understated style and use of counterpoint. "Indian Camp" has themes such as childbirth and fear of death, which permeate much of his subsequent work. When In Our Time was published the quality of writing was noted and praised; scholars consider "Indian Camp" an important story in the Hemingway canon.

Plot summary

The story begins as young Nick Adams, his father and his uncle, paddle a canoe across a lake to an Indian camp. Nick's physician father has been summoned to deliver a child for a woman who has been in labor for days. At the camp, they find the woman in a cabin lying on the bottom of a bunkbed; above, lies her husband with an injured foot. While Nick holds a basin, his father performs a Caesarian operation with a jack-knife. After the baby's delivery, Nick's father realizes the woman's husband has fatally slit his throat with a straight-edged razor and is covered with blood. Nick is sent out of the cabin to discover his uncle gone. The story ends with Nick and his father, in the canoe, on the lake, paddling away from the camp. Nick asks his father why the woman's husband killed himself, as he silently tells himself he will never die.

Background

The story was written a few months after Hemingway's first child, John Hemingway, was born in Toronto in 1923.[1] Hemingway biographer Kenneth Lynn suggests that the experience inspired Hemingway to write the story. Hemingway was on a train, returning from New York to Toronto, when his wife Hadley went into labor. Lynn believes Hemingway was likely terrified Hadley would not survive the birth, and he became "beside himself with fear ... about the extent of her suffering and swamped by a sense of helplessness at the realization that he would probably arrive too late to be of assistance to her".[2]

In the story, Nick Adams' father, the doctor, who is portrayed as "professionally cool,"[3] is based on Hemingway's own father, Clarence Hemingway.[1] Hemingway's paternal uncle, George, appears in the story, and is treated unsympathetically.[4]

Publication history

File:InOurTime.JPG
"Indian Camp" was published by Boni and Liveright in the short story collection In Our Time, shown here in first edition with dustwrapper

"Indian Camp" began as a 29 page untitled manuscript that Hemingway cut to 7 pages; initially the story was titled "One Night Last Summer". The original manuscript included a section that would eventually be published posthumously as "Three Shots".[5] In 1924, the story was first published in Paris in Ford Madox Ford's literary magazine transatlantic review, edited by Ezra Pound. "Indian Camp" was placed in a section titled "Works in Progress" that included a piece from James Joyce's manuscript Finnegan's Wake.[6] "Indian Camp" was republished a year later, on October 5 1925 by Boni & Liveright, in the second expanded edition of the short story collection In Our Time.[7] The initial print-run was 1335 copies.[8]

"Indian Camp" was included in Hemingway's collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories published in October 1938.[9] Two collections of short stories published after Hemingway's death included "Indian Camp": The Nick Adams Stories (1972) and The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition (1987). The Nick Adams Stories (1972), edited by Philip Young, included the story fragment titled "Three Shots" that Hemingway originally cut from "Indian Camp."[10]

Writing style

Carlos Baker maintains that Hemingway learned in his short stories how to "get the most from the least, how to prune language how to multiply intensities, and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth".[11] The style is known as the iceberg theory because in Hemingway's writing the hard facts float above water; the supporting structure, complete with symbolism, operates out-of-sight.[11] Jackson Benson believes Hemingway used autobiographical details to work as framing devices to write about life in general—not only about his life.[12] The concept of the iceberg theory is sometimes referred to as the "theory of omission." Hemingway believed the writer could describe one thing though an entirely different thing occurs below the surface.[13] Tetlow believes in this early story Hemingway showed little concern for character development by simply placing the character in his surroundings, with the use of descriptive detail such as a screaming woman, men smoking tobacco, and an infected wound lending a sense of veracity.[14]

"Indian Camp" is constructed in three parts: the first places Nick and his father on a dark lake; the second takes place in the squalid and cramped cabin amid terrifying action; and the third shows Nick and his father back on the lake—bathed in sunlight.[14][15] Hemingway's use of counterpoint in his fiction is evident in "Indian Camp", as at the end Nick trails his hand in the lake water that "felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning".[15] Paul Strong believes the deleted section provided context and counterpoint to the plot. For example, in "Three Shots" Nick is alone in the "stillness of the night" whereas in "Indian Camp" the middle scene is crowded with people. Strong believes it is likely Hemingway eliminated those scenes to create counterpoint and unity between "Indian Camp" and the next Nick Adams story "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife".[15] Paul Smith writes that the elimination of the material later renamed and published as "Three Shots" serves to focus on the immediacy of the central point of the story: the initiation rituals of life and death familiar to the residents of the Indian camp, but alien to young Nick. Unable to express his feelings in fullness, in the end, as he trails his water "he felt quite sure that he would never die".[16]

Themes and genre

"Indian Camp" is about fear of death. The pieces cut from the story highlight Nick's fear; the published version underscore Nick's fear in a less obvious manner.[17] By introducing Nick Adams in "Indian Camp", biographer Philip Young writes that Hemingway's emphasis in "Indian Camp" was not so much on the woman who gives birth or the father who commits suicide, but on young Nick Adams, who witnesses these events and becomes a "badly scarred and nervous young man." Hemingway sets events in "Indian Camp" that shape the Adams persona. Young considers this single Hemingway story to hold the "master key" to "what its author was up to for some thirty-five years of his writing career".[18] Critic Howard Hannum agrees. He believes the trauma of birth and suicide Hemingway paints in "Indian Camp" gave a leitmotif from which Nick could never escape—thereby providing Hemingway a framework of unity for the Nick Adams stories.[19]

The story is an initiation story,[20] in which the child Nick is initiated to the adult world of childbirth and death. Nick's father (Dr. Adams) introduces his son to sexuality, childbirth, and unintentionally to violent death—for Nick the two become inextricably interwoven. Wendolyn Tetlow maintains that in "Indian Camp" sexuality culminates in "butchery-style" birth and bloody death, and that Nick's anxiety is manifested when he must turn away from the events in the cabin.[14] The story reaches a climax with Nick's "heightened awareness" of evil, which Tetlow writes the child cannot assimilate, so he turns away. Later in the canoe, Nick denies death by asserting he will never die.[21]

The question of the woman's husband, who commits suicide, is enigmatic. Paul Strong finds the arguments that the husband is driven to suicide by the wife's screaming to be problematic because the suicide occurs at the moment the screams are silenced. He writes the husband, perhaps, commits suicide because he is "driven frantic by his wife's pain, and perhaps his own".[15] In his essay "Hemingway's Primitivism and 'Indian Camp'" Jeffrey Meyers writes that Hemingway was very clear about the husband's role, because in this story he was writing about a familiar subject—the experiences of his boyhood in Michigan. The young father's role is to "deflate the doctor", who finds victory in slicing open the woman's belly to deliver the infant, and to provide a counterpoint to the mother's strength and resilience. The father's suicide serves as a symbolic rejection of the white doctor whose skill is necessary but who brings with him destruction.[22] In her paper "Screaming Through Silence: The Violence of Race in 'Indian Camp'" Amy Strong writes "Indian Camp" is about domination; the husband kills himself at the moment his wife is cut open by a white doctor. Strong sees the theme of domination on a variety of levels: the father dominates the son; the white outsiders dominate in the Indian camp; and the white doctor "has cut into the woman, like the early settlers leaving a gash in the tree."[23]

The story also shows a belief in the innocence of childhood; Nick Adams believes he will live forever, be a child forever.[24] Nick Adams is a character who sees his life "stretching ahead."[25] However, "Indian Camp" shows an early fascination with suicide, and conflict between fathers and sons.[26] Young considers it "unavoidable" to focus on the fact that both the principals in the story—the father, based on Clarence Hemingway, and the boy, based on Hemingway himself—end up committing suicide.[27] Kenneth Lynn agrees, and points out the irony to modern readers: both characters in "that boat on the lake would one day do away with themselves", referring to Hemingway's father's suicide in the late 1920s, and Hemingway's in 1961.[28]

Meyers claims the story is not autobiographical though it is an early example of Hemingway's ability to tell stories "true to life."[29] Of the relation between imagination and reality, Hemingway admitted that "Indian Camp" represents one of the stories in which his imagination makes a story seems real: "Everything good he'd ever written he'd made up ... Of course he'd never seen an Indian woman having a baby. That was what made it good."[30] Jackson Benson writes in "Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life" that critics must ignore finding connections between the author's life and fiction and instead focus on the manner in which biographical events are transformed into art. He believes the events in a writer's life might have only a vague relationship to the fiction like a dream from which a drama emerges. Of Hemingway's earliest stories, Benson claims "his early fiction, his best, has often been compared to a nightmare".[12]

Reception and legacy

Hemingway had received good reviews for his pamphlet of short stories published in 1924, titled in our time, in a small print-run from Ezra Pound's modernist series through Three Mountains Press in Paris. At that time Edmund Wilson wrote, "that 'Hemingway's prose was of the first distinction'". Wilson's comments were sufficient to bring attention to the young writer.[31]

"Indian Camp" received considerable praise. Ford Maddox Ford saw "Indian Camp" as an important early story by a young writer.[32] When the story was first published in the mid-1920s, critics in the United States claimed Hemingway reinvigorated the short story by his use of declarative sentences and his crisp style.[33] Hemingway admits In Our Time has a collection of stories with "pretty good unity" and generally critics agree.[15]

Modern Hemingway scholars, such as Jackson Benson, rank "Indian Camp" as one of Hemingway's "greatest short stories," a story that is described as "best known", "violent" and "dramatic".[12] In 1992, Frederick Busch wrote in The New York Times that Hemingway had gone out of fashion. His anti-semitism, racism, violence and attitude toward women and homosexuals made him a politically incorrect writer; but he turned violence into art unlike any other American writer of his time by showing that "the making of art is a matter of life or death, no less". Busch writes that Hemingway's attitude is evident as early as 1924 in the stories of In Our Time—characters in his fiction either faced life or chose death, a choice shown most starkly in "Indian Camp". The saving of a life in "Indian Camp" is at the center of Hemingway's fiction, Busch writes, and what continues to give his fiction power, decades after the author himself chose death by suicide in 1961.[34]

References

  1. ^ a b Meyers 1985, p. 214
  2. ^ Lynn 1987, p. 229
  3. ^ Meyers 1985, p. 48
  4. ^ Meyers 1985, p. 16
  5. ^ Tetlow 1992, p. 52
  6. ^ Baker 1972, pp. 21–24
  7. ^ Baker 1972, p. 410
  8. ^ Oliver 1999, p. 169
  9. ^ Baker 1972, p. 412
  10. ^ Oliver 1999, p. 324
  11. ^ a b Baker 1972, p. 117
  12. ^ a b c Benson 1989
  13. ^ Oliver 1999, pp. 321–322
  14. ^ a b c Tetlow 1992, pp. 53–55
  15. ^ a b c d e Strong 1991
  16. ^ Smith 1996, p. 48
  17. ^ Busch, Frederick (July 25, 1999). "Fear Was His Beat". The New York Times. Retrieved 11 February 2011.
  18. ^ Young 1964, p. 6
  19. ^ Howard 2001
  20. ^ Tetlow 1992, p. 87
  21. ^ Tetlow 1992, p. 65
  22. ^ Meyers 1990, pp. 307–308
  23. ^ Strong 1991
  24. ^ Mellow 1992, p. 267
  25. ^ Mellow 1992, p. 311
  26. ^ Meyers 1985, p. 214
  27. ^ Young 1973, p. 7
  28. ^ Lynn 1987, p. 229
  29. ^ Meyers 1985, p. 16
  30. ^ qtd in Meyers 1985, p. 592
  31. ^ Wagner-Martin 2002, pp. 4–5
  32. ^ Mellow 1992, p. 236
  33. ^ Mellow 1992, p. 314
  34. ^ Busch, Frederick (January 12, 1992). "Reading Hemingway Without Guilt". The New York Times. Retrieved 11 February 2011.

Sources

  • Baker, Carlos (1972). Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (4th ed.). Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01305-5. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |note= ignored (help)CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
  • Benson, Jackson (1989). "Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life". American Literature. 61 (3): 345–358.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
  • Benson, Jackson, ed. (1996). The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-45479-X. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Check |isbn= value: checksum (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |authors= (help)
  • Hannum, Howard (2001). "'Scared sick looking at it': A Reading of Nick Adams in the Published Stories". Twentieth Century Literature. 47 (1).
  • Lynn, Kenneth (1987). Hemingway. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-38732-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
  • Mellow, James R. (1992). Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-37777-3.
  • Meyers, Jeffrey (1985). Hemingway: A Biography. London: Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-42126-4.
  • Meyers, Jeffrey (1990). "Hemingway's Primitivism and "Indian Camp"". In Benson, Jackson (ed.). New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-1067-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Oliver, Charles M. (1999). Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work. New York: Checkmark. ISBN 0-8160-3467-2. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Smith, Paul (1996). "1924: Hemingway's Luggage and the Miraculous Year". In Scott, Donaldson (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-45479-X. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: checksum (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Strong, Amy (1996). "Screaming Through Silence: The Violence of Race in Indian Camp and The Doctor's Wife". The Hemingway Review. 16 (1). {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Strong, Paul (1991). "The First Nick Adams Stories". Studies in Short Fiction. 28 (1): 9. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Tetlow, Wendolyn (1992). Hemingway's In our time: lyrical dimensions. Cranbury NJ: Associated University Presses. ISBN 8-8387-5219-5. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: checksum (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  • Young, Philip (1964). Ernest Hemingway (1973 ed.). St. Paul MN: University of Minnesota. ISBN 0-8166-0191-7. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  • Wagner-Martin, Linda (2002). "Introduction". In Wagner-Martin, Linda (ed.). Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises: A Casebook. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514573-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
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