Hemingway being a man’s man writing about men’s men. On Men Without Women.
All in all, there are fourteen stories in Hemingway’s Men Without Women, and some of them (surprise, surprise) actually have women in them. So the title is a bit ambiguous at best, as all most of the stories are. But this is Hemingway and he’s known to be a little bit opaque but profound. Sometimes not, but that’s up for us as the readers to decide. There are stories here of various lengths, the longest being a little over thirty-five pages long (the starter, The Undefeated) and the shortest a mere two and a half pages (A Banal Story, which is even barely a story).
Some of these stories are some of the most well known in the English language, taught in high school curricula as an introduction to the English language. In it, two characters — a man and a woman, are having an ambiguous conversation about the nature of their relationship and what to do next. Without mentioning a word about it, we can vaguely guess that they are talking about abortion. Yet, the conversations reveal so much about their dynamics and despite the banality of the setting, their desperation and the heightened tension between the two.
The Undefeated, being the first and the longest is perhaps the most difficult and the most memorable. The difficulty is in the fact that Hemingway assumes every single one of his reader speaks Spanish and is a fan of Spanish bullfighting. If you’re not familiar with it (I wasn’t and still am not) then you might struggle a fair bit to get terms like picador, banderillos, corrida, paseo, barrera, so have Google Translate with you. Yet, it is a bloody story of a bullfighter in his twilight taking on the meanest bull of them all. I saw this story as a mini The Old Man and the Sea, where the old man is battling a bull instead of a big fuckoff marlin.
Another one that hits hard is The Killers, where a bunch of no good smart-ass nobodies come into a restaurant and held everybody in the place hostage in order to kill a man who routinely has his dinner there at six in the evening. He didn’t come, but after being released, one of the captives found him lying down in his bed, indifferent to the fact that the killers will get him or not, bereft of any will to live.
Some of the others that stuck out on my mind is Fifty Grand (a boxer bets fifty grand against himself that he won’t be able to beat his opponent), A Canary for One (a couple shares a sleeping train with an American lady to Paris, the tagline being they’re on the verge of divorce themselves) and In Another Country (a wounded soldier received an unwelcome backlash from a comrade who told him not to marry, having just lost his wife).
Yet it is difficult to pin down a pattern to most of these stories, save for the fact that much of the characters are hard-worn, disillusioned men. They are weary for having made too many mistakes, bad decisions and misfortunes. They are disillusioned from the hopes of their youth and obsessing over the what-could-have-beens. Yes, some other readers find these types of characters indigestible. They are the man’s man and overly so. is this what it’s like for men free from the influence of women? I’d hate to think so.
But if you’re familiar with Hemingway’s writing, these types of blokes seep out in almost every page, winning your attention without really demanding it. Quite a few of these men are absolute fucking trainwrecks, and the old adage hold true in that we can’t look away from a trainwreck. What’s more, they’d leave as an even bigger trainwreck. And knowing this, almost all the stories feel anticlimactic — nihilistic even. It is the same impression you’re left with on Farewell to Arms, where the end is just a whimpering death.
Perhaps, at least in me, that there lurks an innate fear that I become one of Hemingway’s men. And no, I don’t want to be these jaded man’s man, knowing what happened to Hemingway himself. You can take these stories as cautionary tales without really asking what has happened to them in between, but just knowing the end result. No, we can do better than being these Hemingway anti-heroes, we might even need women in our lives to soften us up a little.
