MEN WITHOUT WOMEN: Ernest Hemingway E-Book

Ernest Hemingway

• Herausgeber: Lebooks Editora
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 230

Beschreibung

Ernest Hemingway, (1899 – 1961) was an American novelist and short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writings and for his adventurous and widely publicized life.  A consummately contradictory man, Hemingway achieved a fame surpassed by few, if any, American authors of the 20th century. The virile nature of his writing, which attempted to re-create the exact physical sensations he experienced in wartime, big-game hunting, and bullfighting, in fact masked an aesthetic sensibility of great delicacy. Men Without Women (1927) is the second collection of short stories written by Hemingway. The volume consists of 14 exciting stories covering subjects such as: bullfighting, boxing, prizefighting, infidelity, divorce, and death. The stories: "The Killers", "Hills Like White Elephants", and "In Another Country" are among Hemingway's better works.

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Ernest Hemingway

MEN WITHOUT WOMEN

1st edition

Isbn: 9786558941620

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Foreword

Dear Reader

Ernest Hemingway, (1899 – 1961) was an American novelist and short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writings and for his adventurous and widely publicized life.

A consummately contradictory man, Hemingway achieved a fame surpassed by few, if any, American authors of the 20th century. The virile nature of his writing, which attempted to re-create the exact physical sensations he experienced in wartime, big-game hunting, and bullfighting, in fact masked an aesthetic sensibility of great delicacy. He was a celebrity long before he reached middle age, but his popularity continues to be validated by serious critical opinion.

Men Without Women (1927) is the second collection of short stories written by Hemingway. The volume consists of 14 stories, 10 of which had been previously published in magazines. The subject matter of the stories in the collection includes bullfighting, prizefighting, infidelity, divorce, and death. The stories: "The Killers", "Hills Like White Elephants", and "In Another Country" are among Hemingway's better works.

A very good read.

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Table of contents

INTRODUCTION

About the author

About Men without Women

MEN WITHOUT WOMEN

THE UNDEFEATED

IN ANOTHER COUNTRY

HILLS LIKE WHITE ELEPHANTS

THE KILLERS

CHE TI DICE LA PATRIA?

FIFTY GRAND

A SIMPLE ENQUIRY

TEN INDIANS

A CANARY FOR ONE

AN ALPINE IDYLL

A PURSUIT RACE

TODAY IS FRIDAY

CURTAIN BANAL STORY

NOW I LAY ME

INTRODUCTION

About the author

Ernest Hemingway, in full Ernest Miller Hemingway, was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park], Illinois, U.S. and died on July 2, 1961, Ketchum, Idaho, American novelist and short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and widely publicized life. His succinct and lucid prose style exerted a powerful influence on American and British fiction in the 20th century.

The first son of Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway, Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in a suburb of Chicago. He was educated in the public schools and began to write in high school, where he was active and outstanding, but the parts of his boyhood that mattered most were summers spent with his family on Walloon Lake in upper Michigan. On graduation from high school in 1917, impatient for a less-sheltered environment, he did not enter college but went to Kansas City, where he was employed as a reporter for the Star. He was repeatedly rejected for military service because of a defective eye, but he managed to enter World War I as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. On July 8, 1918, not yet 19 years old, he was injured on the Austro-Italian front at Fossalta di Piave. Decorated for heroism and hospitalized in Milan, he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who declined to marry him. These were experiences he was never to forget.

After recuperating at home, Hemingway renewed his efforts at writing, for a while worked at odd jobs in Chicago, and sailed for France as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. Advised and encouraged by other American writers in Paris—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound—he began to see his non journalistic work appear in print there, and in 1925 his first important book, a collection of stories called In Our Time, was published in New York City; it was originally released in Paris in 1924.

In 1926 he published The Sun Also Rises, a novel with which he scored his first solid success. A pessimistic but sparkling book, it deals with a group of aimless expatriates in France and Spain—members of the postwar Lost Generation, a phrase that Hemingway scorned while making it famous. This work also introduced him to the limelight, which he both craved and resented for the rest of his life. Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring, a parody of the American writer Sherwood Anderson’s book Dark Laughter, also appeared in 1926.

The writing of books occupied Hemingway for most of the postwar years. He remained based in Paris, but he traveled widely for the skiing, bullfighting, fishing, and hunting that by then had become part of his life and formed the background for much of his writing. His position as a master of short fiction had been advanced by Men Without Women in 1927 and thoroughly established with the stories in Winner Take Nothing in 1933. Among his finest stories are “The Killers,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

At least in the public view, however, the novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) overshadowed such works. Reaching back to his experience as a young soldier in Italy, Hemingway developed a grim but lyrical novel of great power, fusing love story with war story. While serving with the Italian ambulance service during World War I, the American lieutenant Frederic Henry falls in love with the English nurse Catherine Barkley, who tends him during his recuperation after being wounded. She becomes pregnant by him, but he must return to his post. Henry deserts during the Italians’ disastrous retreat after the Battle of Caporetto, and the reunited couple flee Italy by crossing the border into Switzerland. There, however, Catherine and her baby die during childbirth, and Henry is left desolate at the loss of the great love of his life.

Hemingway’s love of Spain and his passion for bullfighting resulted in Death in the Afternoon (1932), a learned study of a spectacle he saw more as tragic ceremony than as sport. Similarly, a safari he took in 1933–34 in the big-game region of Tanganyika resulted in Green Hills of Africa (1935), an account of big-game hunting. Mostly for the fishing, he purchased a house in Key West, Florida, and bought his own fishing boat. A minor novel of 1937 called To Have and Have Not is about a Caribbean desperado and is set against a background of lower-class violence and upper-class decadence in Key West during the Great Depression.

By now Spain was in the midst of civil war. Still deeply attached to that country, Hemingway made four trips there, once more a correspondent. He raised money for the Republicans in their struggle against the Nationalists under General Francisco Franco, and he wrote a play called The Fifth Column (1938), which is set in besieged Madrid. As in many of his books, the protagonist of the play is based on the author. Following his last visit to the Spanish war, he purchased Finca Vigía (“Lookout Farm”), an unpretentious estate outside Havana, Cuba, and went to cover another war—the Japanese invasion of China.

The harvest of Hemingway’s considerable experience of Spain in war and peace was the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a substantial and impressive work that some critics consider his finest novel, in preference to A Farewell to Arms. It was also the most successful of all his books as measured in sales. Set during the Spanish Civil War, it tells of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer who is sent to join a guerrilla band behind the Nationalist lines in the Guadarrama Mountains. Most of the novel concerns Jordan’s relations with the varied personalities of the band, including the girl Maria, with whom he falls in love. Through dialogue, flashbacks, and stories, Hemingway offers telling and vivid profiles of the Spanish character and unsparingly depicts the cruelty and inhumanity stirred up by the civil war. Jordan’s mission is to blow up a strategic bridge near Segovia to aid a coming Republican attack, which he realizes is doomed to fail. In an atmosphere of impending disaster, he blows up the bridge but is wounded and makes his retreating comrades leave him behind, where he prepares a last-minute resistance to his Nationalist pursuers.

All of his life Hemingway was fascinated by war—in A Farewell to Arms he focused on its pointlessness, in For Whom the Bell Tolls on the comradeship it creates—and, as World War II progressed, he made his way to London as a journalist. He flew several missions with the Royal Air Force and crossed the English Channel with American troops on D-Day (June 6, 1944). Attaching himself to the 22nd Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, he saw a good deal of action in Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge. He also participated in the liberation of Paris, and, although ostensibly a journalist, he impressed professional soldiers not only as a man of courage in battle but also as a real expert in military matters, guerrilla activities, and intelligence collection.

Following the war in Europe, Hemingway returned to his home in Cuba and began to work seriously again. He also traveled widely, and, on a trip to Africa, he was injured in a plane crash. Soon after (in 1953), he received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short heroic novel about an old Cuban fisherman who, after an extended struggle, hooks and boats a giant marlin only to have it eaten by voracious sharks during the long voyage home. This book, which played a role in gaining for Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, was as enthusiastically praised as his previous novel, Across the River and into the Trees (1950), the story of a professional army officer who dies while on leave in Venice, had been damned.

By 1960 Hemingway had left Cuba and settled in Ketchum, Idaho. (He expressed his belief in what he called the “historical necessity” of the Cuban Revolution; his attitude toward its leader, Fidel Castro, who had taken power in 1959, varied.) He tried to lead his life and do his work as before. For a while he succeeded, but, anxiety-ridden and depressed, he was twice hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he received electroshock treatments. Two days after his return to the house in Ketchum, he took his life with a shotgun. Hemingway had been married four times: to Hadley Richardson in 1921 (divorced 1927), Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927 (divorced 1940), Martha Gellhorn in 1940 (divorced 1945), and Mary Welsh in 1946. He had fathered three sons: John Hadley Nicanor (“Bumby”), with Hadley, born in 1923; Patrick, with Pauline, in 1928; and Gregory, also with Pauline, in 1931.

Hemingway left behind a substantial amount of manuscript, some of which has been published. A Moveable Feast, an entertaining memoir of his years in Paris (1921–26) before he was famous, was issued in 1964. Islands in the Stream, three closely related novellas growing directly out of his peacetime memories of the Caribbean Island of Bimini, of Havana during World War II, and of searching for U-boats off Cuba, appeared in 1970.

Hemingway’s characters plainly embody his own values and view of life. The main character of The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls are young men whose strength and self-confidence nevertheless coexist with a sensitivity that leaves them deeply scarred by their wartime experiences. War was for Hemingway a potent symbol of the world, which he viewed as complex, filled with moral ambiguities, and offering almost unavoidable pain, hurt, and destruction. To survive in such a world, and perhaps emerge victorious, one must conduct oneself with honor, courage, endurance, and dignity, a set of principles known as “the Hemingway code.” To behave well in the lonely, losing battle with life is to show “grace under pressure” and constitutes in itself a kind of victory, a theme clearly established in The Old Man and the Sea.

Hemingway’s prose style was probably the most widely imitated of any in the 20th century. He wished to strip his own use of language of inessentials, ridding it of all traces of verbosity, embellishment, and sentimentality. In striving to be as objective and honest as possible, Hemingway hit upon the device of describing a series of actions by using short, simple sentences from which all comment or emotional rhetoric has been eliminated. These sentences are composed largely of nouns and verbs, have few adjectives and adverbs, and rely on repetition and rhythm for much of their effect. The resulting terse, concentrated prose is concrete and unemotional yet is often resonant and capable of conveying great irony through understatement. Hemingway’s use of dialogue was similarly fresh, simple, and natural sounding. The influence of this style was felt worldwide wherever novels were written, particularly from the 1930s through the ’50s.

A consummately contradictory man, Hemingway achieved a fame surpassed by few, if any, American authors of the 20th century. The virile nature of his writing, which attempted to re-create the exact physical sensations he experienced in wartime, big-game hunting, and bullfighting, in fact masked an aesthetic sensibility of great delicacy. He was a celebrity long before he reached middle age, but his popularity continues to be validated by serious critical opinion.

About Men without Women

Men Without Women (1927) is the second collection of short stories written by American author Ernest Hemingway.  The volume consists of 14 stories, 10 of which had been previously published in magazines. It was published in October 1927.

The subject matter of the stories in the collection includes bullfighting, prizefighting, infidelity, divorce, and death. "The Killers", "Hills Like White Elephants", and "In Another Country" are among Hemingway's better works.

Men Without Women was variously received by critics. Cosmopolitan magazine editor-in-chief Ray Long praised the story "Fifty Grand", calling it, "one of the best short stories that ever came to my hands... the best prize-fight story I ever read... a remarkable piece of realism."

In the New York Times Book Review, Percy Hutchinson praised him for "language sheered to the bone, colloquial language expended with the utmost frugality; but it is continuous and the effect is one of continuously gathering power." Even Krutch, writing in the Nation in 1927, said of Men Without Women, "It appears to be the most meticulously literal reporting and yet it reproduces dullness without being dull."

To:

MEN WITHOUT WOMEN

THE UNDEFEATED

Manuel Garcia climbed the stairs to Don Miguel Retana’s office. He set down his suitcase and knocked on the door. There was no answer. Manuel, standing in the hallway, felt there was someone in the room. He felt it through the door.

— Retana — he said, listening.

There was no answer.

He’s there, all right, Manuel thought.

— Retana — he said and banged the door.

— Who’s there? — said someone in the office.

— Me, Manolo — Manuel said.

— What do you want? — asked the voice.

— I want to work — Manuel said.

Something in the door clicked several times and it swung open. Manuel went in, carrying his suitcase.

A little man sat behind a desk at the far side of the room. Over his head was a bull’s head, stuffed by a Madrid taxidermist; on the walls were framed photographs and bullfight posters.

The little man sat looking at Manuel.

— I thought they’d killed you — he said.

Manuel knocked with his knuckles on the desk. The little man sat looking at him across the desk.

— How many corridas{1} you had this year? — Retana asked.

— One — he answered.

— Just that one? — the little man asked.

— That’s all.

— I read about it in the papers — Retana said. He leaned back in the chair and looked at Manuel.

Manuel looked up at the stuffed bull. He had seen it often before. He felt a certain family interest in it. It had killed his brother, the promising one, about nine years ago. Manuel remembered the day. There was a brass plate on the oak shield the bull’s head was mounted on. Manuel could not read it, but he imagined it was in memory of his brother. Well, he had been a good kid.

The plate said: — The Bull ‘Mariposa’ of the Duke of Veragua, which accepted 9 varas for 7 caballos, and caused the death of Antonio Garcia, Novillero, April 27, 1909.

Retana saw him looking at the stuffed bull’s head.

— The lot the Duke sent me for Sunday will make a scandal — he said. — They’re all bad in the legs. What do they say about them at the Café?

— I don’t know — Manuel said. — I just got in.

— Yes — Retana said. — You still have your bag.

He looked at Manuel, leaning back behind the big desk.

— Sit down — he said. — Take off your cap.

Manuel sat down; his cap off, his face was changed. He looked pale, and his coleta pinned forward on his head, so that it would not show under the cap, gave him a strange look.

— You don’t look well — Retana said.

— I just got out of the hospital — Manuel said.

— I heard they’d cut your leg off — Retana said.

— No — said Manuel. — It got all right.

Retana leaned forward across the desk and pushed a wooden box of cigarettes toward Manuel.

— Have a cigarette — he said.

— Thanks.

Manuel lit it.

— Smoke? — he said, offering the match to Retana.

— No — Retana waved his hand. — I never smoke.

Retana watched him smoking.

— Why don’t you get a job and go to work? — he said.

— I don’t want to work — Manuel said. — I am a bullfighter.

— There aren’t any bullfighters anymore — Retana said.

— I’m a bullfighter — Manuel said.

— Yes, while you’re in there — Retana said.

Manuel laughed.

Retana sat, saying nothing and looking at Manuel.

— I’ll put you in a nocturnal if you want — Retana offered.

— When? — Manuel asked.

— Tomorrow night.

— I don’t like to substitute for anybody — Manuel said. That was the way they all got killed. That was the way Salvador got killed. He tapped with his knuckles on the table.

— It’s all I’ve got — Retana said.

— Why don’t you put me on next week? — Manuel suggested.

— You wouldn’t draw — Retana said.

— All they want is Litri and Rubito and La Torre. Those kids are good.

— They’d come to see me get it — Manuel said, hopefully.

— No, they wouldn’t. They don’t know who you are anymore.

— I’ve got a lot of stuff — Manuel said.

— I’m offering to put you on tomorrow night — Retana said. — You can work with young Hernandez and kill two novillos after the Charlots.

— Whose novillos? — Manuel asked.

— I don’t know. Whatever stuff they’ve got in the corrals. What the veterinaries won’t pass in the daytime.

— I don’t like to substitute — Manuel said.

— You can take it or leave it — Retana said. He leaned forward over the papers. He was no longer interested. The appeal that Manuel had made to him for a moment when he thought of the old days was gone. He would like to get him to substitute for Larita because he could get him cheaply. He could get others cheaply too. He would like to help him though. Still, he had given him the chance. It was up to him.

— How much do I get? — Manuel asked. He was still playing with the idea of refusing. But he knew he could not refuse.

— Two hundred and fifty pesetas — Retana said. He had thought of five hundred, but when he opened his mouth it said: two hundred and fifty.

— You pay Villalta seven thousand — Manuel said.

— You’re not Villalta — Retana said.

— I know it — Manuel said.

— He draws it, Manolo — Retana said in explanation.

— Sure — said Manuel. He stood up. — Give me three hundred, Retana.

— All right — Retana agreed. He reached in the drawer for a paper.

— Can I have fifty now? — Manuel asked.

— Sure — said Retana. He took a fifty peseta note out of his pocket-book and laid it, spread out flat, on the table.

Manuel picked it up and put it in his pocket.

— What about a cuadrilla{2}? — he asked.

— There’s the boys that always work for me nights — Retana said. — They’re all right.

— How about picadors? — Manuel asked.

— They’re not much — Retana admitted.

— I’ve got to have one good pic — Manuel said.

— Get him then — Retana said. — Go and get him.

— Not out of this — Manuel said. — I’m not paying for any cuadrilla out of sixty duros.

Retana said nothing but looked at Manuel across the big desk.

— You know I’ve got to have one good pic — Manuel said.

Retana said nothing but looked at Manuel from a long way off.

— It isn’t right — Manuel said.

Retana was still considering him, leaning back in his chair, considering him from a long way away.

— There’re the regular pics — he offered.

— I know — Manuel said. — I know your regular pics.

Retana did not smile. Manuel knew it was over.

— All I want is an even break — Manuel said reasoning. — When I go out there I want to be able to call my shots on the bull. It only takes one good picador.

He was talking to a man who was no longer listening.

— If you want something extra — Retana said, — go and get it. There will be a regular cuadrilla out there. Bring as many of your own pics as you want. The charioted is over by ten-thirty.

— All right — Manuel said. — If that’s the way you feel about it.

— That’s the way — Retana said.

— I’ll see you tomorrow night — Manuel said.

— I’ll be out there — Retana said.

Manuel picked up his suitcase and went out.

— Shut the door — Retana called.

Manuel looked back. Retana was sitting forward looking at some papers. Manuel pulled the door tight until it clicked.

He went down the stairs and out of the door into the hot brightness of the street. It was very hot in the street and the light on the white buildings was sudden and hard on his eyes. He walked down the shady side of the steep street toward the Puerta del Sol. The shade felt solid and cool as running water. The heat came suddenly as he crossed the intersecting streets. Manuel saw no one he knew in all the people he passed.

Just before the Puerta del Sol he turned into a café.

It was quiet in the café. There were a few men sitting at tables against the wall. At one table four men played cards. Most of the men sat against the wall smoking, empty coffee-cups and liqueur-glasses before them on the tables. Manuel went through the long room to a small room in back. A man sat at a table in the corner asleep. Manuel sat down at one of the tables.

A waiter came in and stood beside Manuel’s table.

— Have you seen Zurito? — Manuel asked him.

— He was in before lunch, the waiter answered. — He won’t be back before five o’clock.

— Bring me some coffee and milk and a shot of the ordinary — Manuel said.

The waiter came back into the room carrying a tray with a big coffee-glass and a liqueur-glass on it. In his left hand he held a bottle of brandy. He swung these down to the table and a boy who had followed him poured coffee and milk into the glass from two shiny, spouted pots with long handles.

Manuel took off his cap and the waiter noticed his pigtail pinned forward on his head. He winked at the coffee-boy as he poured out the brandy into the little glass beside Manuel’s coffee. The coffee-boy looked at Manuel’s pale face curiously.

— You fighting here? — asked the waiter, corking up the bottle.

— Yes — Manuel said. — Tomorrow.

The waiter stood there, holding the bottle on one hip.

— You in the Charlie Chaplin’s? — he asked.

The coffee-boy looked away, embarrassed.

— No. In the ordinary.

— I thought they were going to have Chaves and Hernandez — the waiter said.

— No. Me and another.

— Who? Chaves or Hernandez?

— Hernandez, I think.

— What’s the matter with Chaves?

— He got hurt.

— Where did you hear that?

— Retana.

— Hey, Looie — the waiter called to the next room, — Chaves got cogida.

Manuel had taken the wrapper off the lumps of sugar and dropped them into his coffee. He stirred it and drank it down, sweet, hot, and warming in his empty stomach. He drank off the brandy.

— Give me another shot of that — he said to the waiter.

The waiter uncorked the bottle and poured the glass full, slopping another drink into the saucer. Another waiter had come up in front of the table. The coffee-boy was gone.

— Is Chaves hurt bad? — the second waiter asked Manuel.

— I don’t know — Manuel said. — Retana didn’t say.

— A hell of a lot he cares — the tall waiter said. Manuel had not seen him before. He must have just come up.

— If you stand in with Retana in this town, you’re a made man — the tall waiter said.

— If you aren’t in with him, you might just as well go out and shoot yourself.

— You said it — the other waiter who had come in said. — You said it then.

— You’re right I said it — said the tall waiter. — I know what I’m talking about when I talk about that bird.

— Look what he’s done for Villalta — the first waiter said.

— And that ain’t all — the tall waiter said. — Look what he’s done for Marcial Lalanda. Look what he’s done for Nacional.

— You said it, kid — agreed the short waiter.

Manuel looked at them, standing talking in front of his table. He had drunk his second brandy. They had forgotten about him. They were not interested in him.

— Look at that bunch of camels — the tall waiter went on. — Did you ever see this Nacional II?

— I seen him last Sunday, didn’t I? — the original waiter said.

— He’s a giraffe — the short waiter said.

— What did I tell you? — the tall waiter said. — Those are Retana’s boys.

— Say, give me another shot of that — Manuel said. He had poured the brandy the waiter had slopped over in the saucer into his glass and drank it while they were talking.

The original waiter poured his glass full mechanically, and the three of them went out of the room talking.

In the far corner the man was still asleep, snoring slightly on the intaking breath, his head back against the wall.

Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited. He kicked his suitcase under the table to be sure it was there. Perhaps it would be better to put it back under the seat, against the wall. He leaned down and shoved it under. Then he leaned forward on the table and went to sleep.

When he woke there was someone sitting across the table from him. It was a big man with a heavy brown face like an Indian. He had been sitting there some time. He had waved the waiter away and sat reading the paper and occasionally looking down at Manuel, asleep, his head on the table. He read the paper laboriously forming the words with his lips as he read. When it tired him, he looked at Manuel. He sat heavily in the chair, his black Cordoba hat tipped forward.

Manuel sat up and looked at him.

— Hullo, Zurito — he said.

— Hello, kid — the big man said.

— I’ve been asleep. Manuel rubbed his forehead with the back of his fist.

— I thought maybe you were.

— How’s everything?

— Good. How is everything with you?

— Not so good.

They were both silent. Zurito, the picador, looked at Manuel’s white face. Manuel looked down at the picador’s enormous hands folding the paper to put away in his pocket.

— I got a favor to ask you, Manos — Manuel said.