Hemingway’s Art of Revision: The Making of the Short Fiction
By John Beall.
Louisiana State University Press, 2024.
Hardcover, 310 pages, $50.
Reviewed by Sean C. Hadley.
In Brad Paisley’s 2005 hit song, “Alcohol,” the country musician sings about the praises and follies that accompany imbibing various adult beverages. In a singularly specific line, Paisley Croons, in the persona of “alcohol,” said that he “helped Hemingway write like he did.” The song is fun and silly, but reveals something significant about American culture. Hemingway’s public personality, suffused with hot-tempered fights, womanizing, and lots of drunkenness, is so embedded into the public imagination that a line like this is taken at face value, an expression of a truth that everyone already knows. Of course, anyone who has spent enough time studying Hemingway’s works knows that this is far from historical fact and that Hemingway’s meticulous writing process would never allow for a drunken evening to interfere with Papa’s artistic aims. For most, any insight into this writing methodology was hindered by the need to pay a personal visit to the JFK Library in Boston, where Hemingway’s manuscripts are held. But now, thanks to John Beall, readers can take an in-depth look at Hemingway’s writing process. Hemingway’s Art of Revision looks at specific short stories and walks through the manuscript evidence in an attempt to illuminate the steps Hemingway took to make a fine story into a great one.
Beall’s book is the culmination of work that began as early as 2015, with early drafts of his investigative work appearing in academic journals around that time. What Beall accomplishes here has much in common with the work of a journalist trying to uncover how a situation went from A to B. Unlike other American authors, Hemingway presents an interesting case for study because of the large amount of manuscript evidence he left behind. While such detective efforts have long existed in literary studies, many authors will throw out their older work or purposefully obfuscate their legacies. C. S. Lewis famously instructed his brother Warnie to burn Lewis’s personal papers upon his death, resulting in the loss of numerous unpublished or half-finished works (with Lewis’s translation of the Aeneid as a popular example). Hemingway, by contrast, preserved so much of his drafts, revisions, notes, marginalia, etc., that the subject of Hemingway’s “craft” has been a common theme among scholars since at least the 1980s. In that sense, Beall’s book does not offer something new, such as a riveting theory of revision or editing. Instead, Beall’s book has a two-fold goal, emphasizing Hemingway’s focus on the “Art of revision” and offering close readings by focusing on what is absent in the text, rather than what is present.
Beall demonstrates not only a genuine understanding of the Hemingway oeuvre but also of the various conversations that scholars have been having for decades. His knowledge of the manuscripts impresses the reader, not only in the sense that Beall has put in hard work, but also in the sheer number of variations Hemingway cycled through when trying to find the perfect phrasing or sentence construction. The many versions of Nick Adams, as seen in the chapter on “Big Two-Hearted River,” reveal the depths of Hemingway’s commitment to making the story effective. Beall carefully unpacks revisions undertaken from the story’s original printing in 1925’s This Quarter to its reprinting in the collection In Our Time, with substantial examination of other revisions along the way. Such editing from Hemingway emphasizes the importance of how Nick’s story ends, omitting direct references to “the war” or Nick’s inner turmoil. Readers may draw their own conclusions about Nick’s personal resilience as a result, and Beall’s work demonstrates how this literary effect was achieved through cutting, revising, and Hemingway’s insistence that the story come off just right. Beall does this throughout for each of the stories he analyzes, creating a book littered with insights and revelations that always add to the reading of Hemingway’s short stories without diminishing their artistic mastery.
The focus on omission is itself not a new one, with Hemingway exploring the idea in his own Death in the Afternoon, a book ostensibly about bullfighting but just as much about writing. In 1988, Susan F. Beegel dedicated an entire book to this idea in Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. But what Beall offers is something more targeted than exploring the “ice-berg theory of writing.” In fact, Beall takes the concept for granted, mentioning it directly only once. His project depends upon Hemingway’s articulation of this concept, which is worth repeating:
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. (Death in the Afternoon, 154)
Beall’s task is to figure out what Hemingway meant by working backwards, retracing his steps, connecting originals, revisions, omissions, and edits to get at the heart of Hemingway’s meaning in his prose. To accomplish this, Beall analyzes an array of Hemingway short stories, from the popular “The Killers” and “Hills Like White Elephants” to the less well-known “Cat in the Rain” and “Fathers and Sons.” Ten stories in all receive the close reading treatment, as well as a look at the newly public domain In Our Time (originally published in 1924). Hemingway’s Art of Revision offers an interesting mixture of detective work and individual interpretation of one of America’s greatest authors, making it of interest to a wide range of readers.
In addition to the “how” of Hemingway’s process, Beall also explores the influence of established writers like Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. These early chapters demonstrate that Hemingway was learning by direct instruction and also from experimenting with the advice he was given. Beall shows that, rather than mere imitation, Hemingway rejected the persistent revisionism of Joyce and the preference for including everything as embodied by Stein. Thus, Hemingway’s own approach to artistic creation was more than the invention of the iceberg theory of writing ex nihilo but rather consisted of a distillation of what he learned into his own editorial approach of crafting fiction. Papa Hemingway’s cultural image is one of bravado and masculinity; not enough attention is paid to the meticulous approach he employed when crafting his fiction.
There is a certain “watching the sausage get made” aspect to Beall’s efforts to understand Hemingway’s revisions. The sheer volume of textual evidence is overwhelming and sometimes contradictory, making the close reading aspect of the work more challenging to execute. How should a scholar, or an interested reader, correctly understand Hemingway’s “absence of eroticism” in “Cat in the Rain” or the importance of “how the waitress set the beer glasses on the table” in “Hills Like White Elephants?” Beall’s analysis offers deep insights into Hemingway the artist, but veers too often into self-insertion when trying to frame the meaning behind the revisions. His willingness to admit that his conjectures are precisely that comes as a relief to the Hemingway enthusiast who might not be prepared for some of the scholarly mire surrounding Hemingway’s work. Such a moment comes when Beall acknowledges his analysis of “Cat in the Rain” provokes questions that have “answers [which] are prolific and inconclusive.” Hemingway’s Art of Revision is an attempt to understand those seven-eighths of the iceberg that always remain submerged below the surface and shrouded by refracted light rather than the openness of day.
The result is a book that offers a fascinating detective’s journey into the methods of a great American author. While all of Beall’s conclusions may not be persuasive, his work undoubtedly provokes the right kinds of questions. This sort of effort is essential in moving the public memory away from Hemingway’s remembrance, away from the hard-drinking man of Paisley’s song, and closer to the image of the artist that he always was.
Sean C. Hadley is a graduate of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (MDiv, 2017) and Faulkner University’s Great Books program (PhD, 2023). His writings have been published in outlets such as The Imaginative Conservative, Touchstone magazine, and The Hemingway Review. Since 2012, he has been a teacher in both the classical Christian and the collegiate classroom. Currently, Hadley is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Classical Education Research Lab.
Support the University Bookman
The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated!
