In her
1927 New Yorker review of Ernest
Hemingway’s Men Without Women,
Dorothy Parker gave the highest praise to one of the included short stories, ”The
Killers,” saying it was one of the four great American short stories, and
adding that the others were Wilbur Daniel Steele’s “Blue Murder,” Sherwood
Anderson’s “I’m a Fool,” and Ring Lardner’s “Some Like Them Cold.” When I read
the Parker review in a collection of her Constant
Reader pieces, I felt I had to see how these stories held up.
The Hemingway entry was the only one I had read before
this project. Generations of anthologists have seconded Parker’s opinion by
including “The Killers” in their collections, but I tried reading it again with
a fresh eye. Hemingway’s story was published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1927 and collected in Men Without Women that same year.
The two
scenes of “The Killers” are constructed to show not only the situation of two
hired killers who’ve come to a small town outside Chicago to kill an
ex-prizefighter, but also a contrast in the way the characters react to it: the
cook who wants nothing to do with it and Nick Adams who wants to alert the
intended victim, notify the police, do
something. Hemingway makes his killers comic, a pair dressed up alike in
overcoats that are too tight, “like a vaudeville team.” But their intentions
are not comic, and, although they fail, everyone in the story knows they will
eventually succeed. This inevitability and the fatalism that meets it—except
for Nick Adams—is the main impact of the story.
Sherwood
Anderson’s “I’m a Fool” was published in The
Dial in 1922 and collected the next year in Horses and Men. With irony that recalls Henry James, but very much
in the American vernacular, Anderson lets his nineteen-year-old narrator make a
fool of himself indeed, not for the reasons he states, but for much deeper
reasons of self-loathing. The boy, who doesn’t know how to do anything but
groom horses because of the choices he’s made, says it’s an honest and
worthwhile endeavor, but his actions show how much he would rather be among the
college kids and the horse-owners he affects to despise. William Faulkner
confirms Parker’s judgment about this one: “next to Heart of Darkness…the best short story I ever read.”
Wilbur Daniel Steele’s “Blue
Murder” was published in Harper’s in
1925 and collected in The Man Who Saw
Through Heaven in 1927. “Blue Murder” is a mystery story; Tony Hillerman
and Otto Penzler included it in The Best
American Mystery Stories of the Century in 2000. Blue Murder is the name of
a horse who is the only sympathetic character in the story aside from the man
who brings him home, who is also the first victim. Three brothers named Bluedge—the
blood and bludgeon suggestion is apt if obvious—a simple farmer, an avaricious
merchant, and a vindictive, jealous simpleton, are the main characters, along
with a nymphette named Blossom who had been courted by all three brothers and
married the wrong one for the wrong reason.
Ring Lardner’s “Some Like Them
Cold” was published in The Saturday
Evening Post in 1921 and collected in How
to Write Short Stories in 1924. Lardner’s story is the only one of the four
that doesn’t stand up very well to the passage of almost a century since it was
written. Charlie Lewis, Lardner’s swaggering Chicagoan, convinced he’ll conquer
New York, already spending the twenty-five grand he’s convinced he’ll be paid
for his first song, ends up settling for a $60 piano-playing gig and the girl
even her brother describes as cold. Lewis is corresponding with a girl he met
as he left Chicago—Mabelle Lewis, the frugal, pie-making, ingenuous and natural
girl he left behind. Lardner could create characters out of the vernacular, but
here those characters amount to no more than the clichés they use.
So what
do these choices say about Parker herself and her critical chops? Except for
the Lardner, these stories are still delighting readers and reappearing in
anthologies. Something about the Mabelle character in the Lardner may have
appealed to her, and in fact Mabelle has a little in common with Parker’s “Big
Blonde.” The other three stories constitute a clinic in the use of language to
construct character, and in Hemingway’s case the restraint of language to the
point of a minimalist limit. Each of these stories moves with an inevitability:
in Hemingway’s story it comes from the threat of the mob that has been enabled
by Prohibition America, which then seems powerless to undo its enabling. In the
other stories the inevitability comes from character. The appeal for Parker,
I’m guessing, is this darkness, with only the slight glimmers of Mabelle’s
decency, the fact that Sherwood Anderson’s character can make choices, and Nick Adams’s naïve resistance.
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