Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway, The

The safari itself lasted about ten weeks, but everything he saw seems to have made an indelible impression on his mind. Perhaps he regained, as the result of his enthusiasm and interest, a childlike capacity to record details almost photographically. It was his first meeting with the famous white hunter Phillip Percival, whom he admired at once for his cool and sometimes cunning professionalism. At the end of the safari, Hemingway had filled his mind with images, incidents, and character studies of unique value for his writings. As the harvest of the trip he wrote the nonfiction novel Green Hills of Africa, and some of his finest stories. These include “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” as well as “An African Story,” which appeared as a story within a story in The Garden of Eden, a novel published posthumously in May 1986.

In spite of the obvious importance of the Paris years on Hemingway’s development as a writer, few of his short stories have French settings. He was aware of that fact and in his preface to A Moveable Feast wistfully mentions subjects that he might have written about, some of which might have become short stories.

During World War II Hemingway served as a war correspondent covering the Normandy invasions and the liberation of Paris. It seems that he also assembled a group of extramilitary scouts keeping pace with the retreating Germans. The balance between fiction and nonfiction in his stories of the period, including the previously unpublished “Black Ass at the Cross Roads,” may never be determined.

Toward the end of his life Hemingway wrote two fables for the child of a friend, “The Good Lion” and “The Faithful Bull,” which were published by Holiday in 1951 and are reprinted here. He also published two short stories in The Atlantic Monthly, “Get a Seeing-Eyed Dog,” and “A Man of the World” (both December 20, 1957).

We have grouped seven previously unpublished works of fiction at the back of the book. Four of these represent completed short stories; the other three comprise extended scenes from unpublished, uncompleted novels.

All in all, this Finca Vigía edition contains twenty-one stories that were not included in “The First Forty-nine.” The collection is named for Hemingway’s home in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba. He lived at Finca Vigía (“Lookout Farm”) on and off during the last two decades of his life. The finca was dear to his heart and it seems appropriate now that it should contain a major portion of his life work, which was even more dear.

—CHARLES SCRIBNER, JR.

Part I

  “The First Forty-nine”

 Preface to

“The First Forty-nine”

THE FIRST FOUR STORIES ARE THE LAST ones I have written. The others follow in the order in which they were originally published.

The first one I wrote was “Up in Michigan,” written in Paris in 1921. The last was “Old Man at the Bridge,” cabled from Barcelona in April of 1938.

Beside The Fifth Column, I wrote “The Killers,” “Today Is Friday,” “Ten Indians,” part of The Sun Also Rises and the first third of To Have and Have Not in Madrid. It was always a good place for working. So was Paris, and so were Key West, Florida, in the cool months; the ranch, near Cooke City, Montana; Kansas City; Chicago; Toronto, and Havana, Cuba.

Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.

There are many kinds of stories in this book. I hope that you will find some that you like. Reading them over, the ones I liked the best, outside of those that have achieved some notoriety so that school teachers include them in story collections that their pupils have to buy in story courses, and you are always faintly embarrassed to read them and wonder whether you really wrote them or did you maybe hear them somewhere, are “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “In Another Country,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “A Way You’ll Never Be,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and a story called “The Light of the World” which nobody else ever liked. There are some others too. Because if you did not like them you would not publish them.

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

Now it is necessary to get to the grindstone again. I would like to live long enough to write three more novels and twenty-five more stories. I know some pretty good ones.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

1938

 The Short Happy Life of