In Our Time

In Our Time

This first edition of Ernest Hemingway's "In Our Time" is a re-bound novel encased in a boring, black hardcover. This text is Ernest Hemingway's first collection of short stories, and the history behind the publication of this collection is fascinating, for example, because of the window it offers not just into his literary talents but also into the intimate relation between his private and public lives. At first glance, this copy seems like nothing special, however, upon second inspection, something immediately catches the eye: a dedication on the first page to Hemingway's first wife, Hadley Richardson Hemingway, whom he claimed to love dearly and spent a large amount of time with, even raising a child together. However, Hemingway never mentioned Hadley in any of his stories, neither here nor in others. Hadley was married to Hemingway during the time he began writing and ended up publishing his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, a story which retells his time in Paris, which was indeed spent with Hadley, however, the story includes no traces of Hadley and rather talks about his relationship with Hadley's friend. 



Hemingway was also working on In Our Time, a collection whose title is derived from the English Book of Common Prayer, “Give peace in our time, O Lord,” after him and Hadley had just moved to Paris. In 1922, all of Hemingway’s manuscripts were stolen at Gare de Lyon train station when Hadley packed them all into a suitcase, including every single duplicate, and the suitcase was then stolen. While it has been noted that Hemingway was furious with his wife, his good friend Ezra Pound informed Hemingway that he “had lost only the time it should take to rewrite the pieces.” By the end of 1923, Hemingway had finished either rewiring the pieces of writing entirely new ones, which became the 1923 version of In Our Time.



The loss of Hemmingway’s original manuscripts may be to blame for the lack of illustrations throughout this text. However, while there are no illustrations, there are a variety of hand-made annotations, such as check marks, underlines, notes, etc., all made, throughout the entire text, with different writing utensils (pen, pencil, colored pencil etc). These details imply that the previous readers of the text studied this text in detail, and highlighted the words and phrases that stood out as important to them. While these markings may not have much significance at all, the fact the Hemingway dedicated his novel to Hadley was surprising to me, and almost mind-blowing, since his first wife, whom he claimed to have loved like no other woman, never appears in his novels. This leads me to believe that “theory of omission,” a style of writing coined by Hemingway, that follows the idea that the deeper meaning behind a story should not be evident on the surface of it, must also apply to his life, more specifically his relationship with his first wife, Hadley. If Hemingway’s love for Hadley was as true and as real as he claimed it to be, what was the reason he left her out of his first novel that he practically wrote by her side?

Ernest Hemingway

Manhattan College, Fales Collection

Boni & Liveright, Inc., New York.

1925

Boni & Liveright, Inc.

Octavo, 214 pages

English

Short Story Collection