Give Peace: 100 Years of Hemingway’s In Our Time

By Victoria Castro

English students will be familiar with the collection; Divinity students will be familiar with its title; all of us are familiar with the author’s name. Ernest Hemingway was barely 23 years old when he produced in our time. He was armed with only two of the many manuscripts he had written after he lost his juvenilia in a trip to Geneva, and with his experience as a journalist for the Toronto Star Weekly. This became the basis for his first collection of short stories: In Our Time. 

To put it into perspective, Hemingway was not much older than the average fourth year undergraduate at university; and, in the fashion of the students who leave our lovely little town during Independent Learning Week, he found himself pouring out the feelings provoked by a postwar world during trips abroad. Had Hemingway been in our time (pun intended), he would have been the most prolific of student writers and shockingly good at disappearing every Friday afternoon just to casually comment on Monday’s 8 A.M. lecture that, yes, he travelled to France during the weekend, how did you know?

Credit: Wikimedia

During Hemingway’s early life, his interests were many, much like every St Andrews student. He competed in boxing, track and field, waterpolo, and football during high school. He also performed in an orchestra and went to music lessons. It is truly an astounding number of extracurriculars taking into account he somehow also managed to be a good student. He would have had an impressive CV. It was two years before graduating that he finally dipped into the world of literature, editing his school’s newspaper, The Trapeze. Imitating popular sportswriters under a pen name, Ring Lardner Jr., led to Hemingway becoming a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star. Although his stay was short (barely six months), the newspaper’s style guide greatly inspired his prose. In a nutshell, it was characterised by short sentences, vigorous English, and optimism (surprising as it might be); does this not remind you of a certain iconic St Andrews newspaper?

Hemingway would not return to writing until 1920, after volunteering as an ambulance driver for a Red Cross Recruitment effort in Italy. Freelancer, staff writer, and foreign correspondent, Hemingway had lived many lives before he had even published his first piece of non-journalistic prose. 

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Boni & Liveright published In Our Time in 1925. The text was composed of fourteen short stories and eighteen vignettes (of which the first six were written by Ezra Pound). Considered one of his early masterpieces, In Our Time explores alienation, grief, loss, and separation, as well as bullfighting, current events, and war. Perhaps it was the impact that imagism had on him, or perhaps the brevity and simplicity that war reporting required, but In Our Time heralded the style Hemingway would become famous for. It marked a change in modern literature. Disruptive and apologetic, readers accompany Nick Adams on largely unconnected adventures. Being the protagonist of several dozen of his short stories and vignettes, Nick is modelled after Hemingway: much like the writer, he joined the Red Cross and, on a much more positive note, spent his summers in Michigan. Hemingway and his readers accompany Nick through his coming of age story, unaware that the character is becoming part of theirs. Spoiler warning — we first meet Nick as a young boy, and we’re eventually invited to his wedding. Alas, Nick isn’t a stranger to suffering, so that might just be as far as his (and our) happiness goes.

A society plagued by uncertainty, instability, and social change had inspired Hemingway. A century after Hemingway wrote In Our Time, we find ourselves in a situation much like his, upheaved by the climate crisis, digital overload, global conflict, economic precariousness – the list goes on. Most importantly, it’s easy to see that the similarities between Hemingway’s and our time (pun intended again) do not end in that sense of historical continuity. To this day, teens and 20 year olds still process society through writing, like Hemingway did. Where Hemingway had Parisian cafés, we have Prèt and Northpoint. He didn’t have our windswept beaches, though, so that’s a win for us.

Credit: Wikimedia 

Ultimately, In Our Time is a product of its period. Hemingway was not much older than most St Andrews students when he wrote it, but he had already been displaced from his home, experienced the horrors of war, lived through the ups and downs of romance, and had even managed a feat many third and fourth years most likely dread: he had found a job. Being a fragmentary novel, the thread that connects its isolated segments is the idea that everything that starts must eventually come to an end. Bulls barrel in, are dealt with in a corrida, then leave; war starts, grows blurry, and finishes; characters appear, play their roles, then bid their goodbyes when you close the book. Critics have suggested that the overarching plot is grief. The imagery of death and decay is prevalent despite the topic. Altogether, the consensus is that In Our Time, as disillusioned as it may appear to be, is proof that grief, too, will end.

In case you are still wondering whether it is a typo or not: yes, the name of the first edition of the text was stylised in lower-case. Although the trend of not capitalising text may seem contemporary, Hemingway was its precursor, truly a man of modern tastes. He combines stylistic experimentation with secular topics and religious imagery (the title, after all, was taken from the Book of Common Prayer). 

In Hemingway’s style, let us combine journalism with prose to commemorate the centenary of his work, and let us plead to “give peace in our time”. Next time you are working on an essay or pouring your feelings out in your notes app, think that Hemingway would approve it.