Introduction

Ernest Hemingway published this collection in 1927, the same year he turned twenty-eight years old. He had already written The Sun Also Rises, already survived the First World War as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, already buried a marriage and begun another, already lived in Paris among the painters and poets and expatriates who were remaking what literature could do. He was, by any reasonable measure, a young man. And yet the fourteen stories gathered in this volume read like dispatches from a consciousness that has already seen everything it needs to see, that has already taken the full measure of human endurance and found it both heroic and heartbreaking in roughly equal proportion. There is no bitterness in these pages, but there is no innocence either. What there is, instead, is something rarer and more difficult to achieve: a prose style so perfectly calibrated to its subject matter that the two become inseparable, so that the way the sentences move — their rhythm, their silences, their deliberate refusals — becomes itself a form of meaning.

To read this book carefully is to receive an education in what fiction can accomplish when a writer trusts his reader completely.

The fourteen pieces collected here range across a geography that was, in the mid-1920s, Hemingway’s own lived world: the cafés and bullrings of Spain, the hospitals and mountain passes of northern Italy, the train compartments and ski lodges of Switzerland and Austria, the boxing gyms and hotel rooms of an America that feels simultaneously familiar and deeply strange. The characters who move through these landscapes are fighters, soldiers, jockeys, gamblers, waiters, soldiers, and men whose professions are never quite named but whose relationship to physical danger is always somehow present. They are men who have been hurt, or who are about to be hurt, or who are watching someone else get hurt and trying to decide what that means. They are men who have lost things — women, certainty, the use of a limb, the ability to sleep without dreaming — and who are attempting, with varying degrees of success, to continue functioning in the absence of those things.

The title itself deserves a moment’s attention before you turn to the first story. Hemingway borrowed it from a musical term: in counterpoint, “men without women” refers to a composition stripped of certain voices, a harmonic arrangement from which something has been deliberately removed. The phrase does not mean, as a careless reading might suggest, that women are absent from these stories. Women appear throughout — as wives, lovers, strangers on trains, nurses, the subjects of conversation between men who cannot quite bring themselves to say what they mean. What the title points toward is something more atmospheric, more tonal: a quality of isolation, of emotional exposure, of men who find themselves in situations where the usual consolations and complications of intimate life have been stripped away, leaving them to face something alone. Whether that something is physical danger, moral ambiguity, the approach of death, or simply the ordinary terror of being a conscious creature in an indifferent world, the stripping-away is the point. These are stories about what remains when the softening context is removed.

The collection opens with “The Undefeated,” a long, dense, magnificently sustained story about a bullfighter named Manuel Garcia who has recently been released from the hospital after a goring and is trying to get back into the ring. The opening pages, in which Manuel negotiates with a promoter named Retana for a spot in a minor nocturnal corrida, establish immediately the emotional and moral territory the entire collection will explore. Manuel is not a great bullfighter. He may once have had the potential to be one, but that moment has passed, and everyone in the story except Manuel seems to know it. Retana knows it. The picadors know it. The crowd, when it comes, will know it. And yet Manuel’s insistence on his own identity — “I am a bull-fighter,” he says, flatly, when Retana suggests he find other work — is not presented as delusion or as pathos, exactly, but as something more complicated and more dignified. It is a form of self-knowledge so complete that it has become indistinguishable from stubbornness, and Hemingway renders it without condescension and without false elevation. Manuel is what he is. The question the story asks is not whether he will succeed but what it means to continue in the face of everything that argues against continuation.

This is the question, in one form or another, that every story in the collection asks.

There is a famous formulation, which Hemingway articulated in various ways throughout his life, about the relationship between what a story says and what it withholds. He compared it to an iceberg: the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who knows what he has omitted, Hemingway argued, strengthens the story through that omission; the reader feels what is there even without knowing consciously what has been left out. This is not a theory about obscurity or deliberate mystification. It is a theory about trust — trust in the reader’s intelligence and emotional responsiveness, trust in the capacity of concrete, specific, accurately observed detail to carry emotional weight without being told to do so.

Reading these stories well means learning to pay attention to what is not said. It means noticing when a character changes the subject, when a conversation stops just before it reaches the thing it has been circling, when a description of a physical action — a man lighting a cigarette, a woman looking out a train window, a fighter adjusting his grip on a sword — carries more emotional information than any direct statement of feeling could. Hemingway’s characters rarely tell each other, or us, what they feel. They act. They speak in short declarative sentences that seem to be about practical matters and are almost always about something else entirely. The gap between what is said and what is meant is where the stories live.

Take “Hills Like White Elephants,” which is among the most discussed short stories in the English language and which earns that attention completely. It consists almost entirely of dialogue between a man and a woman waiting for a train at a station in Spain. They are drinking. They are looking at the landscape. They are talking about something that is never named directly, using a vocabulary of indirection and euphemism that tells you everything about the power dynamics of their relationship and the nature of what is at stake. Nothing is resolved. Nothing is explained. The story ends where it began, in a sense, except that everything has shifted. If you read it quickly, looking for plot, you will find almost nothing. If you read it slowly, attending to the rhythm of the exchanges, to who speaks and who falls silent and what each silence costs, you will find one of the most precise and devastating accounts of a particular kind of human cruelty ever written.

The same principle applies throughout the collection, though the stories vary enormously in length, setting, and emotional register. “The Killers” is a story about two professional hitmen who arrive at a small-town diner looking for a man named Ole Andreson. It reads, on the surface, like a crime story, and it has the clean, hard-edged dialogue of one. But what the story is actually about — what it is doing beneath the surface of its genre conventions — is something more unsettling: a young man named Nick Adams encountering, for what may be the first time, a form of evil that is entirely indifferent to him, and discovering that there is nothing he can do about it. The story’s final image, of Nick deciding he needs to get out of town, is not a resolution. It is a recognition. The reader who understands what Nick has understood will feel the weight of it; the reader who is waiting for something to happen will feel cheated. Hemingway is not interested in cheating you. He is interested in giving you something real.

This is worth saying plainly: these stories reward patience and rereading. The first time through, you may feel that certain pieces end too abruptly, that certain conversations go nowhere, that certain characters remain opaque. This is not a failure of the writing. It is the writing. Return to those moments. Ask what the character is not saying. Ask what the story is not telling you, and why, and what that withholding feels like in your body as a reader. The answers will come, and when they do, they will feel earned in a way that more explicit fiction rarely achieves.

It would be a mistake — a common one — to confuse Hemingway’s prose style with simplicity. The sentences are short, yes. The vocabulary is largely Anglo-Saxon, largely concrete, largely free of the Latinate abstractions that fill so much literary prose. The dialogue sounds like people actually talk, which is to say it is full of repetition and non sequitur and the kind of verbal circling that happens when people are trying to say something they cannot quite bring themselves to say directly. None of this is simple. All of it is the product of extraordinary craft, of a writer who had read enormously and thought deeply about what he had read, who had worked as a journalist and learned the discipline of the exact word in the exact place, who had spent years in Paris in conversation with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald and others who were collectively reinventing what prose fiction could do.

The apparent simplicity is, in fact, a form of extreme sophistication. Consider the opening of “The Undefeated,” which you will encounter on the first page of the stories themselves. Manuel Garcia climbs the stairs to an office, sets down his suitcase, knocks on the door. There is no answer. He knocks again. A voice asks who is there. He says his name. He says he wants to work. In six exchanges of dialogue, Hemingway has established the entire emotional situation of the story: the power differential between Manuel and Retana, Manuel’s vulnerability and his refusal to acknowledge it, the quality of his stubbornness, the indifference of the world he is trying to re-enter. No adjectives have been deployed to tell you how to feel. No authorial voice has intervened to explain the significance of what you are reading. The scene simply is, and it is completely alive.

This quality of aliveness — of scenes and characters that seem to exist independently of the author’s management of them — is what distinguishes Hemingway’s best work from the work of writers who have imitated his style without understanding its sources. The style is not a set of rules about sentence length or vocabulary. It is the outward form of a particular way of seeing: precise, unsentimental, deeply attentive to the physical world, and committed to the belief that emotional truth can only be conveyed obliquely, through the accumulation of accurate detail rather than through direct statement.

The stories in this collection were written at a moment when Hemingway was at the height of his early powers, before the style had hardened into self-parody, before the public persona had begun to overwhelm the private writer. Several of them — “The Killers,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “In Another Country,” “Now I Lay Me” — are among the finest short stories written in English in the twentieth century, and that is not a claim made lightly. They have been read, taught, argued over, and imitated for nearly a century, and they have not worn out. They remain surprising. They remain capable of doing something to you that you did not expect.

The Nick Adams stories scattered through the collection — “The Killers,” “Ten Indians,” “Now I Lay Me” — deserve particular mention for readers who come to this volume without having read Hemingway’s earlier collection, In Our Time. Nick is a recurring character across Hemingway’s early work, a young man from Michigan who serves as a kind of autobiographical surrogate, moving through experiences of violence, loss, and disillusionment that are clearly drawn from Hemingway’s own life. You do not need to have read the earlier stories to understand these ones; each stands completely on its own. But knowing that Nick carries a history, that the young man lying awake in “Now I Lay Me” and the young man watching the killers in the diner are versions of the same consciousness at different stages of its education, adds a dimension of resonance that enriches the reading experience.