By John Beall
John Beall describes the meticulous process through which Hemingway refined his stories for publication.
In my book Hemingway’s Art of Revision, I give a detailed description of how the story “Hills Like White Elephants” evolved from an unfinished draft to the version ultimately published in Men Without Women. I will touch on some of those changes here, to give a sense of how the revisions strengthened and enriched this well-known story.
There are four versions of “Hills Like White Elephants” to consider. First is the 1925 draft, an untitled ink manuscript, written around the same time Hemingway wrote Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (July 16, 1925) about train travel with Hadley from Pamplona to Madrid. Second is the 1927 draft, a titled pencil manuscript, dated by Paul Smith as May 1927, which, according to Hilary Justice, was probably revised when Pauline and Hemingway were on their honeymoon in the south of France. Third is the version published as the lead story in the August 1927 issue of transition, appearing just before James Joyce’s “Continuation of a Work in Progress”—that is, what became part of Finnegan’s Wake. Fourth is the final version published in Men Without Women in October 1927, identical with the version in the “Foundry Set” of proofs dated September 26, 1927.
In the 1925 draft there is very little dialogue, no discussion of a pregnancy or an operation; nor is there any strong indication of friction between the couple in the story. The climax, if there is one, comes when the wind blows the curtain of the railway restaurant so hard it knocks the couple’s beer glasses from the table to the ground. The draft ends in mid-sentence. Hemingway apparently abandoned the story at that point for a couple of years, probably because he was concentrating on The Sun Also Rises.
In the 1927 revision, now titled “Hills Like White Elephants,” Hemingway arrived at the major elements of the story as it appeared in Men Without Women, especially the taut dialogue between the couple concerning an unspecified operation. Between the 1927 manuscript and the story as published in transition, there are few changes, mostly involving punctuation. However, after the version published in transition, but before the “Foundry Set” of proofs, Hemingway retouched the story in ways that strengthened its portrait of the rising tension between the couple. Perhaps he added these touches shortly after June 7, when Pauline and he returned to Paris from their honeymoon. In a letter to Maxwell Perkins dated June 10, 1927, he wrote, “Now if this is to go off on the Aquitane tomorrow, I must go over the HILLS story.” The wording “I must go over” suggests his final review of the story, during which he might have made these late revisions.
First are some small but significant changes in wording and punctuation. For example, in the version published in transition, Hemingway ends the sentence referring to the taste of the Anis del Toro with, “‘It tastes like licorice,’ the girl said.” In the version that appeared in Men Without Women, the sentence ends with the words “and put the glass down.” This additional phrase not only suggests the girl’s dislike of the taste of absinthe but also hints at her independence from the man and contributes to the rising tension in the story.
In the transition version, Hemingway has the girl comment in two sentences about “all we do”: “That’s all we do, isn’t it? Look at things and try new drinks” (10). In the Men Without Women version, Hemingway uses a dash to combine the two sentences: “That’s all we do, isn’t it—look at things and try new drinks?” Thus, Hemingway presents the entire sentence as a sharp-edged, rhetorical question by which the girl mocks the man’s assumed role as her guide. Implied in her “all we do” is what they do not do—make affectionate physical contact, speak tenderly to one another, or share each other’s point of view with any empathy.
Second, in the transition version, the man introduces the topic of “an awfully simple operation” without addressing the girl by her name or nickname. In revising the story for Men Without Women, Hemingway has the man address her by name: “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig.” By adding her name, Hemingway portrays the man as attempting to be personal, and even appear affectionate, at the very moment he turns the conversation in a direction that escalates rather quickly. Continuing the topic of an operation, he again uses her name: “I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig.” By that point the gulf between the man’s addressing her by name, and his assuming she wouldn’t “mind” the operation, is deep.
The point of highest tension in the story comes at the span in the conversation from the girl’s asking the man “Doesn’t it mean anything to you?” to her imploring him to “please stop talking.” In the titled manuscript, as Hilary Justice has noted, Hemingway added a seventh “please” to what was initially a series of six. In the manuscript that I examined at the Kennedy Library, Hemingway clearly added this seventh “please” with a line pointing to that “please” after and above the sixth “please.” The seventh “please” gives slightly more emphasis to the girl’s strenuous appeal for silence. To my ear the seventh “please” adds just the right punch.
Significantly, in the 1927 manuscript draft Hemingway crossed out the words “Three of us” just after the girl asks, “Doesn’t it mean anything to you?” and before she says, “We could get along.” Likewise, Hemingway later crossed out the man’s starting to say, “Three of us could get” right before the girl says, “I’ll scream.” In other words, in the 1927 pencil manuscript, Hemingway deleted any references to a third person and thus removed explicit references to abortion as the topic of their conversation, leaving the pronoun “it” with its multiple possible referents. Hemingway even cut indirect or euphemistic references to abortion, such as when he struck the man’s claim that “it’s just a question of expediency” and “I know how the other thing is”—both statements that do not appear in the versions published either in transition or in Men Without Women. Hemingway seemed about to have the man say, “The three of us could get along.” By keeping the man from completing his statement, Hemingway stops short of having the man concede to the girl’s apparent reluctance to have the operation. These excisions contribute to the fruitful ambiguity of the story, leaving the reader to guess or infer what topic the couple is discussing—or talking around—and leaving open whether they decide to raise a child or not, to stay together or not.
The story concludes with a final, evocative exchange. Hemingway revised no part of this dialogue that ends the story both in the 1927 manuscript and in the version published in Men Without Women. The story ends with the girl’s repeating, “I feel fine. . . . There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.” I agree with Verna Kale who takes the view that Hemingway “built ambivalence and ambiguity into the story so that, whichever ending the reader chooses, the story holds tightly together.” That is, whether the couple stays together or not, whether the girl agrees to have the operation or not, Hemingway ended the story in medias res, without our knowing for certain whether the couple resolves the tensions between them. Such ambiguity contributes to the story’s tension, leaving the ending rich in possible meanings.
References
Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition.
Scribner’s, 2003.
The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Hemingway Library Edition. Scribner’s, 2017.
———. “Hills Like White Elephants.” transition, August 1927, pp. 9–14.
———. The Letters of Ernest Hemingway. Edited by Sandra Spanier et al., vol. 2, Cambridge UP, 2011.
———. The Letters of Ernest Hemingway. Edited by Sandra Spanier et al., vol. 3, Cambridge UP, 2015.
Justice, Hilary. The Bones of the Others: The Hemingway Text from the Lost Manuscripts to the
Posthumous Novels. Kent State UP, 2006.
Kale, Verna. Ernest Hemingway. Reaktion Books, 2016.
Smith, Paul. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. G. K. Hall, 1989.
John Beall taught at Collegiate School in New York City for thirty years. An independent scholar, he has published essays in the James Joyce Quarterly, Hemingway Review, MidAmerica, and Paideuma.
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In Hemingway’s Art of Revision, John Beall analyzes more than a dozen pieces of the author’s celebrated short fiction, with a focus on manuscripts and typescripts, as part of a broader examination of how Ernest Hemingway crafted his distinctive prose through a rigorous process of revision.
Ranging from two vignettes in the first version of In Our Time through early touchstones such as “Indian Camp” and “The Killers” to later masterpieces including “Fathers and Sons,” Beall’s study considers the modernist influences, aesthetic choices, and experimental effects that characterized Hemingway’s approach to the short story. By drawing attention to the meticulous omissions, additions, and replacements that shaped these texts, Beall reveals how extensively and richly Hemingway revised his drafts. Hemingway’s Art of Revision gives a detailed view of a great prose stylist at work.