Russ Pottle on "Hills Like White Elephants"

This episode of One True Podcast is supported by the Hemingway Review, the scholarly journal of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society. Michael and I are huge fans of the Hemingway Review. We always read it to see the latest scholarship. You can buy back issues of the Hemingway Review at Hemingwaysociety.org/journals. Welcome to One True Podcast. My name is Mark Chirino with Michael von Cannon producing. In his memoir, A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway wrote, "All you have to do is write one true sentence, write the truest sentence that you know. So finally, I would write one true sentence and then go on from there." And at same spirit of honesty, creativity and curiosity, One True Podcast explores all things related to Ernest Hemingway, his life, his work, and his world. Here at One True Podcast, Michael and I have vowed to devote a show eventually to every single Hemingway short story, one for each of the first 49. And we're doing a pretty good job so far. We've had some memorable shows with some fantastic guests about both Hemingway's Masterpieces and also some minor efforts. And you wouldn't have thought it would have taken this long, but here we are at long last. We're pushing four years and we are finally going to focus on Hills like White Elephants. Hills like White Elephants from Hemingway's 1927 short story collection Men Without Women is his iconic story that if you've read one Hemingway story, it's probably this one. If you've read three, this is definitely one of them. So is this story Hemingway's best or only his most famous? Why has Hills like White Elephants been so enduring? To help us figure all of this out, we are delighted to welcome Russ Pottle to the conversation. Russ Pottle is Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Worcester State University in Central Massachusetts and a member of the Hemingway Review Editorial Board. His research and teaching interests are in travel writing studies, popular culture, medical literature, and the life and work of Ernest Hemingway. His essay on Hills like White Elephants is a real highlight of the recent book Hemingway's Spain, Imagining the Spanish World, a book I edited with Carl E.B. Actually I think I brought Carl Coffey while he edited it. Anyway, it doesn't matter, it's a wonderful essay. Welcome to One True Podcast, Russ Pottle. Happy to be here. Great to have you, Russ, and especially on such a hallowed occasion is talking about Hills like White Elephants. So I love to get at some of the questions that I brought up in the introduction, but before we do, what is the summary of Hills like White Elephants? What is, what happens in the story? What is it about? So we're in Spain in the 1920s in a railway station along the Ebro River at a point where a rail line running north-south, not originating at Pamplona, but running through Pamplona, meets up with a main line that runs east and west, connecting Barcelona and Madrid as the two major cities. It's hot. It's really hot. Nearby a traveling couple, a man and a woman are chatting about what they should drink while they're waiting for a train to Madrid, which is coming in 40 minutes to text houses. Or it sounds like chatting anyway at first. Pretty quickly, we can hear that they're in a tense and coded conversation. They're not exactly fighting or arguing. It feels more like wrestling, like one of those styles where everything is enclosed and you try to shift your opponent off center while holding your own balance. We can figure out through the dialogue that the woman, whose name or nickname is "Jig is pregnant," that the man who is called the American in the text is trying to talk Jig into terminating the pregnancy, and the Jig is not at all sure about that. So they struggle with each other. But it seems as if they don't want to get to a place where someone says something they can't on say. So they engage, they pull back, they distract into another topic. Separately, they get up and move around to interrupt when things get too tense. But toward the end, things actually look like they're getting out of hand. Big threatens to scream and the American takes an extended break. He moves their bags to the platform for the arriving train. He walks around a bit, has a drink at the station bar, and comes back to the couple's table. He asks how she is and she says, "I feel fine. There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine." So that's what happens. As for what the story is about on one level, it's exactly about a couple trying not to argue about whether Jig should choose to terminate her pregnancy. On another level, it's about all sorts of things. Not to terminate. Choice, control, coercion, women's bodies, male irresponsibility and privilege. Take your back. So that's a lot crammed into just a couple of pages, isn't it Russ? I think the story is maybe 1500 words or so. Okay. Well, then that'll allow us to kind of slow walk through it and try to get as many of the major concepts, themes and moments and actually sentences, which there are some magnificent ones. Before we even get to the beginning, what about the title? Hills like White Elephants, it is a simile as a title. Think about how many titles you've ever heard in songs or movies or stories where there's a simile in it. What do you make of the simile? How does that language function in the story? It functions in the story as a way of signaling to us. I think that that jig, she's called the girl and referred to as a girl in the story. But that's something I'd rather not do. So I'll call her the woman. I think it's our first inkling that she has a creative mind. She's able to see things in similar metaphor and then immediately after while she's saying this, we realize that her companion, the American, doesn't get it at all. There's a sense that the next 30 minutes or so is going to be really uncomfortable. So is there something about the image of an elephant or a white elephant that is resonant in the story? What's our association with that animal or with that object? Well, the association with the animal could be any number of things. It could be a sacred animal. If it's just a figure of speech, a white elephant is maybe something that's expensive to have, but pretty useless. So it could go in a couple of different directions. The simile actually comes from Hemingway's own consciousness. In 1925, after the cent from mean, he and Hadley, Hemingway and Hadley, Richard's and his first wife, took that. That's trained from Pemplona to Cassatus. And Hemingway created a sort of autobiographical sketch out of that. In the sketch, he spends a lot of time on the hills. He spends a good four paragraphs describing the hills. He says that they look like white elephants. But they're mysterious both both he and he reports Hadley saying they're mysterious and Hemingway spends a good bit of time on their color, how they might have gotten that color without being snow-capped, how they might look on a cloudy day. And again, he actually talks about elephants in this sketch. He says in the heat, they show us white elephants in the sun. The simile right there, that's Hemingway. And is it making too much to that simile would suggest the kind of too mesench of a pregnant woman or is that taking it too far? I'm not sure what's too far. When I read the story, I don't actually get that from it. I've read that in the criticism. I'm not going to tell somebody that they can't. You know, remark on something they believe they can. Also heard the phrase the elephant in the room, which is, I mean, whether or not that was Hemingway had that in mind, how perfect is that for this story? Right? Avoiding. It is. It is. It is. I could talk around something that everybody knows just nobody wants to acknowledge. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I could see that one popping out in a no-handry story. But the idea of the elephant and the elephant in the room for Hemingway, I don't know if that lines up. Nobody's really sure where the central conflict comes from. Where the argument over terminating, the pregnancy comes from. Robert McCallman says that he He put the bug in Hemingway's ear. Paul Smith sees the story as part of a long rumination on marriage that Hemingway pursued through a number of stories in the early 20s. It could be a continuation of the Sun also rises where people live among abortions and rumors abortions or it could be Hemingway's own experience. Some of the biographies suggest that Hadley maybe had and Pauline probably had an abortion terminated a pregnancy. That's kind of unknown, but the idea of the hills and the color and the rest of that, that's all straight out of Hemingway's mind. And there's a lot, I wanna say there's a lot that's transposed from that 1925 autobiographical sketch into the story, but Hemingway does what he does, he transposes it and then he cuts it all back. So instead of say four paragraphs on the hills and their coloring and that they look like white elephants, he just cuts that down to a few sentences. Russ, I think one of the really conspicuous elements of this story is the proportion between dialogue and description. And if you flip through the story, you see most of it is dialogue and there are a couple paragraphs of description and we start with maybe the longest paragraph of description. And so I hope we can talk about that, but what about the setting and the way that Hemingway establishes the scene? Like for instance, this long first prose paragraph before we get into the dialogue of the two characters, what does that give us in terms of setting the reader in the scene? - It puts the reader right in the scene. The hills across the valley of the abro were long and white. And then in that first prose paragraph, you hear about this side of the station. And so as opposed to that side of the station, and so we're here, that's when I talk about summarizing the story, it's like we're there, that first prose paragraph establishes the setting, but it also puts us as readers right there at the next table because we too are on this side of the river. And there's the other side that we can see. So it's really, it's not the only, it's not the only Hemingway story that kind of puts you right there, right? Like the opening of the killers, the door opens and you're in the diner, right? But in this one, it's almost as if Hemingway is working to make the reader an eavesdropper on this. Although there are things in the story that if you were sitting next to them, you couldn't see. But there's an immediacy. You're with them, you feel it's hot. You can hear their tenseness, you can hear their struggles. - Of the two sides that Hemingway's talking about, one side is shady and the other side is illuminated. And so it seems like there's a dark side and a bright side. And you wonder how that might manifest itself in the story. The other thing Russ is, as you were saying about these two characters and the way they're named and characterized in that first paragraph, it says the American and the girl with him. And I think that's such a weird choice by Hemingway to have the man be identified by his nationality and the woman to be identified by her gender. I mean, by all accounts, wouldn't you say that the, that jig was also an American? Why is Hemingway making these kinds of distinctions? - I don't know that jig is American or not American. Why Hemingway would make the American and American is an interesting question. We can figure out from the story a lot about him. He's older, he's well traveled. He speaks Spanish quite well, at least in addition to English. The implication in the text is that he's done this before. Maybe not at this particular railway station, maybe so, but certainly somewhere and conceivably more than once, right? He's very comfortable talking about the procedure for terminating a pregnancy and he promises that he can be with jig during the procedure so she won't go it alone. And he says he's known a lot of people who've gone through it. We know, right, abortion was illegal in Spain in the 20s, but it was illegal throughout Western Europe and North America too. But that doesn't mean it wasn't available. Anything's available as long as you have money, right? And the American seems to. So maybe this is a reflection of the time in the 20s. You know, when the dollar was king and Americans could afford, Americans could afford anything. As usual, it's the folks of that money who gets screwed. Not the people with money. So the American seems very familiar with the set of circumstances that you get to, you know, you get to know only by doing. And in the setting of the story, that's a little bit creepy, you know, especially when he's sure as jig that everything will be fine after. You know, he's gonna dump her, right? The question is whether he does that, you know, now, or whether he waits and they have a child and he dumps her that. So, you know, I think there's an argument out there that he's a predator. And I'm just, you know, I'm thinking about, you know, I'm thinking about the, you know, the foot loose Americans out there. In Hemingway's, in Hemingway's fiction, you know, there's, you know, there are at least one or two, right? And the sun also rises, you know, right before, right before Hemingway writes this. - Well, Russ, in the way that Hemingway writes Hillslake White Elephants and Dialogue, he doesn't really indicate to the reader how things are said. And so, your reading of the American man is, as he, that he is quite sinister and a predator. Does Hemingway open the text up a little bit to allow for this man to be at all compassionate or at all concerned about jig? Or do you think that this is pretty clearly suggested by Hemingway? - Personally, I think it's clearly suggested by Hemingway. I think that there was probably a time in the stories development when there might have been a window for compassion to the American, or toward the American, in a pencil manuscript of the story. That's in the Kennedy Library. There's a point where, the very last part of the story, where the American gets up and walks, moves the bags, goes and has a drink in the bar. And in the pencil manuscript, the American kind of goes into a ramp in his own head. There's got to be a world where things are reasonable. There's got to be a place where things are simpler than this. And in that, you could certainly, I think, read the panic of indecision. The weight that is bearing down on him as part of this decision making process. But Hemingway draws a big act, it's actually an act, draws a big X through it, right? And then substitutes a different sentence. And once that sort of rant is out, we're left with, as you say, we're left with, you know, inflectionless dialogue. But a lot of it has to do with the American's own comfort, and not particularly Jigs. He keeps saying things like, "I know it'll be fine. I know it'll be fine afterwards." - It's the only thing that worries me, right? - Yeah, yeah. And you know, you don't want me to be worried right now. So there's that. I mean, he's like, you know. - Yeah, there is that suggestion that I'm going to be a better boyfriend or husband once, I promise, once this happens. So that strikes one as manipulative of the situation. - Yeah, I mean, Hemingway is so great at creating complex characters in a short period of time. And it seems that the American is just every shallow jerk that you've ever met. - I want to go back to what you said in your summary of the story when you compared it to these two people wrestling. And one aspect of two people wrestling is that they're both equal in the same contest. but it almost seems like the man's goal. and the woman's goal are not in this story are not exactly the same that the girl is not really here to fight right she's sort of trying to either parry the things that he is trying to say or defend herself or just get him to shut up. It doesn't seem like she is there to litigate her side of the story. So I guess what I'm really asking about is the power dynamics in the conversation much of which is implied by Hemingway's iceberg theory. How does that play out? I think actually that jig does attempt to litigate her side of things. The American keeps droning on and on and Pamela smiley has a really great article about how his use of language is very narrow and limited he keeps repeating the same things over and over. She keeps trying to find new ways to talk about things and this is where you know here's where the hills come in here's where your comments about the scenery come in. She has an imaginative mind and she's able to see in the landscape around her possibility. She's able to make meaning out of the hills and out of the river and out of the trees and you know out of the trees. Out of the shadow of a cloud moving across the grain. These are all impenetrable images right there just there. They're the landscape they have no meaning intrinsically but she's able to create meaning out of it. And I think she's trying to convey to him the kind of possibility for life that she sees in the landscape and he's just you know he's he's he's bent on his opinion he's not going to see any of this. And you know and and I think that you know I think that starts to show you know that starts to show by the you know by the end of by the end of the story that they that you know you're right there they're going in and you know and absolutely opposite directions you know they're thinking of the thing of it this way right. There are 15 uses of the verb look in the story three of them we can discount right because they're like you know the hills look like white elephants you know. But the story the description of the description what little there is in the story is almost like stage directions right like she looked at the ground you know between the table legs. So so in terms of that there are 10 uses right of look there are exactly four uses of C and two of them we can knock out because one of them is a figure of speech will wait and see and the other one is the is the American reporting that he's not seen a white. So so that leaves exactly two uses of the word of the verb C in there and each character gets one right. Jig gets it first when she goes to the she goes out to the to the railing on the station and she looks across the river and she can see the river through the trees right and then that's where the cloud moves and that's where the you know the the furl valley and the you know the grain. And the rest of that so she can see that that's and you know seeing is a cognitive act looking is a physical act right so she can see this so this is for a second right we're breaking you know having a breaking point of view and we're inside Jigs head she can see this it's hopeful for her it's it's possible for her. And you know and and that's what she you know that's where she wants them to go I think and then turns around and says you know we could have all this but every day you know we make it more and we we make it less and less possible. The American gets to see when he goes at the toward the end of the story when he goes you know to the to the other platform to move the bags he looks down the tracks and he couldn't see the train train but he couldn't see it right and so at that point right now we're inside the Americans had for a couple of minutes and he goes back into the bar has a drink and looks around at the people and sees the word see isn't there but you know you put it in there in brackets and sees it. Everybody else is waiting for the train right and so what a great ad verb isn't I know it doesn't replace the rant that you were talking about yes it does yes it does it does and so you know so we go from you know we go from the rant where there's you know where there's a valence into into his panic is in decision. His you know his his conflicted feelings but that gets xed out again you know big acts and and instead we get you know we get the idea that everybody else is a reasonable person they're not arguing they're waiting for the train they're doing what he wants them to do and so you know and so at you know at that point you know we've got you know we've got kind of a you know kind of a one dimensional guy he's been. He's been he's been pressing his case yeah and now he's now he's going to project it you know project his you know his case upon you know all the people sitting waiting for the train everybody is reasonable except for his what a yeah that's a great run through there a couple moments that I'd like to I'd like to touch on you sort of alluded to one so let me read just a little exchange and rest we can kick this around it's really an awfully simple operation jig the man said it's not really an operation at all the girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on I know you wouldn't mind it jig it's really not anything it's just to let the air in the girl did not say anything I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time so we have the man saying three things and all we know is where the that she's looking down and then that she didn't say anything and you know and I'm a way doesn't tell us this but I hear that really taking a long time that she is just she's not going to respond to this because they're talking in sort of on different levels and to look down at the table legs is to have downcast eyes it's to be disappointed by what you're hearing not wanting to make eye contact with the person you're having a conversation with so I find that you know so I find that exchange even though the man is doing all of the talking I really like the way jig is characterized during that during that exchange you know there's so many you know there's so many things that go on in the story that you really have to you really you really have to work at it right and the jazz pianist Cecil Taylor I think I think this I think this is what you have said you know it takes you know it takes me a long time to compose this music it ought to take you even longer to learn to listen to it and to understand it you know so it's easy to kind of like read along the surface surface of the story but then you know you get these cues you know maybe maybe she's looking you know maybe she is downcast maybe she's looking at the you know at the ground that the table legs rested on because she's disappointed in him you know I'm thinking of you know jig gets the best lines story right so I'm thinking I'm thinking of you know of one of them you know that's all we do isn't it you know look at things and try new drinks there are so many ways that that could be said yeah and him it you know of course having way is not giving us a clue so we have to sort it out right I mean you could see you know the easy thing is sarcasm right or vicious sarcasm but suppose that suppose that she's saying it in a bewildered tone like she's just now figuring it out you know on the station platform with his badgering that oh man we've got an empty life you know or you know or suppose you know suppose she's saying it in you know it's kind of a sorrowful resigned tone yeah you know that's that's our life it's a really interesting point which is to ask really how is jig different at the end of the story then she will like what does she learn what does she learn about herself what does she learn about their relationship One of the moments that I I mean I'm not sure Jig always gets the credit for this. We could have everything. We can have everything. No, we can't. We can have the whole world. No, we can't. We can go everywhere. No, we can't. It isn't ours anymore. It's ours. No, it isn't. So she's standing up for herself, right? Five, six times. She's saying no. Wait, the line that you're feeding me, the nonsense is it's not true. I know, I know it, right? And she she has a reality that she's not going to be gaslighted about this. There's one school of thought that says that that she's a lot more worldly and experienced than she might seem. I'm not, I'm not sure that, you know, I'm not sure that I'd buy that all the way, but she is a lot smarter than he is. She has much more of an imaginative, as I've said, creative mind. She's willing, on the one hand, she's willing to create this image for herself out of the landscape, which is, it's a wonderful image, it's great and hopeful, but it's like really, you're turning the impenetrable landscape into something that's beneficial to you. This is something that the travel writers do all the time and struggle against, trying to read meaning, their own meanings into the landscape. So she can do that, but at the same time, as you said, she can be a hard-nosed realist. He is feeding her alive. And if you think about things literally, we can go anywhere, well, you're an American, you've got a bunch of money, but we really can't go anywhere. We really can't do everything that we want to do. Freud civilization and its discontents, right? There are things that we can't do even though we may want to do them. So she's a really interesting mixture of motivations and thought patterns and decision-making processes. You say what does she learn by the end of the story? I'm not sure, because I think for her, the pregnancy is still an open question by the end of the story. I don't think for her, remaining with the American is an open question. I think it's gonna be, I think it's a question of who dumps who first. But I think that she's her decision-making about the pregnancy is still up in the air. A sequel would have been really interesting. The next stop of the train station. No, no, no, no. You can't have a sequel, right? And this is why the suspended ending is so awesome. What is it? Henry James, the novelist defines when the characters' relationships to each other start and stop. You can't get on the train with them. As a matter of fact, at the end of the story, they haven't even gotten on the train yet. We're still within that five minute window between when the person in the bar tells them five minutes and when the train actually pulls up. Because, you know, Hemingway knows this. If they get on the train, it's 200 miles to Madrid. Think of that at like, you know, the blinding speed of the 1920s train being like 35 miles an hour, you know. That's six more hours that they're going to spend together. So you can't have secret awkwardness. Yeah, well, actually, you know, Russ, there's several other exchanges and moments of dialogue that I want to talk about. But if I just can pull back for one second. So we have been talking about this as an unspoken, discussion about the word abortion is unspoken. And in fact, Hemingway, you know, this is what it's, even Hemingway has acknowledged that that's what it's about. Does the story function if a reader thinks it's about something, thinks that the dispute is about something other than an abortion? There's a nasty comment out there about Virginia. Yeah, that's right. That she thought it was a dental declaration. And I'm not really sure about that. I mean, you know, come on, you know, Virginia Woolf is an idiot, right? I don't know whether it functions without, you know, abortion or a woman's choice at the center of the story. Probably because I never really thought about it, you know, any other way. And it's, and even if you know nothing about the story, you used to use the story in teaching, in teaching all the time. And I would break the class into groups of two or three and give them unmarked, unfoot, no, to talk about the story, right? And have them, yeah, and have them read it to each other, allowed, which you can do even in a 50 minute class. You know, you've got time to read the story and try to figure it out. And then, you know, do some discussion questions and come back, you know, that's how short the story is. But invariably they got it. They may not have gotten it till the end of the story and they might have gotten it when they were discussing it, you know, together. But it's, I don't know that, you know, that the idea that this has centered around abortion or terminating a pregnancy is all that hard to grasp. It makes the stakes in the story really high if it is, if it is about that, and, you know, as she said, Hemingway has said, it's about that. Because, you know, here, you know, anything else or most other things are gonna be less than what you might perceive as life and death. You know, we don't know how far along. - It's right. - The reason I asked that is because, first of all, I've taught this story and I've heard many different theories about what the operation could be. Oh, sure. And, you know, lobotomy, sex change, adoption, and operation in the sense of like a criminal action, you know, like the operation, like any kind of thing. And I guess the question is taking aside that abortion would have a particularly loaded element to it, the fact still remains that this guy is trying to get this girl to do something that she really in her heart doesn't want to do, or she's at the very least enormously unsure about doing it. And so, on that level, even if you, and I'm putting this in quotes, misread the actual subtext or the, you know, the hidden part of the iceberg, you still get the effect that Hemingway is trying to describe, which is that the guy is simply trying to manipulate the person that he's with, right? Whether it's about the thing that it's specifically about, you still get the main gist of the power imbalance. - Oh, yeah, no, no, no. I see the answer that you're getting at. Yeah, very much so. Okay, suppose it's a lobotomy. It's still a struggle between two people. One person, you know, absolutely sure what he wants, the other, not sure what she wants, and actively looking for alternatives. And so, you know, in, right, the name of the story collection, Ben with that women. - Yeah. - You know, this is about male, you know, male female, dynamic, gendered dynamics. - But you're absolutely right. There are some sinister anthologies that have in the introduction, oh, here, now you're about to read a story where a man and a woman are about arguing about an abortion, but it's not named, which kind of takes the magic of the story away. It's really beautiful to see new readers, new to Hemingway learning as they go along what they are arguing about, figuring it out for themselves. - Yeah, my favorite part of that whole exercise with the story was watching students read it to each other. Because, you know, because it does, you know, it does read as any number of people pointed out, it does read like a dramatic script. You know, there are lines and you have to figure out how to say them, right? And you have to, you know, you have to figure out the, you know, the tone and who's saying what? And you can see the students stop and then like back up and do it again, you know. - They do it again, yeah. - Yeah, try to wrestle with, you know, you know, with it and it's just, you're right, it's horrible. - Oh, yeah. - To have that taken away by, by, of all things, a foot-- - No, no. So I have a suggestion of one of the way I like to hear this particular exchange and rust. Tell me if you hear this any differently. So come back in the shade, he said, you mustn't feel that way. I don't feel any way the girl said, I just know things. I don't want you to do anything that you don't want to do. And then it's hyphenated. So the woman, the girl interrupts him and she says, nor that isn't good for me. She said, I know, could we have another beer? And in my hearing of the story, there is no way that she doesn't imitate him when she says, nor that isn't good for me. She is definitely, definitely parroting the nonsense, 'cause she's had it. At this point in the story, she knows exactly what she's gonna say. And you know, Russ, you said this earlier, how repetitive, mind numbingly repetitive this guy is. And she knows his argument already. - She does. She does. No, that's a great reading. That's exactly the way I read it. And it's why when things really come to a pitch, she doesn't ask him to please stop talking. She says, please seven times. And it's like, just shut up. You've said it, you're gonna say it again. How many more times can you say it the same thing and hope for a new story? a different outcome. Russ I wish we had an extra half hour so we can figure out why Hemingway landed on seven. One of my favorite parts of the Ken Burns documentary is one of our friend Miriam Mandel says the line seven times when she narrates it which is wonderful. She says to him, "What you please, please please please please please please please please stop talking." Was it always seven in the manuscript? Yes wow. Yeah to my knowledge. Yeah it looks like she says in the pencil manuscript it looks like she says would you you know would you please time six stop talking and then it looks like in pencil that he's kind of tucked another please in there to make it seven. So numerologists unite. I'm not sure what that means but it started out as six and ended up as seven. When she does tell him is she done here? Is like any further discussion it's only going to make matters worse. So the response to that is he did not say anything right. He listens at least for a second or two. A second or two but I mean he's just you know well also remember he's you know he stops and you know she's she's at the point of screaming and the last thing he wants is a scene. Right. And he's and he's been actively trying to avoid a scene. You know getting some drinks you know moving around you know he's he's he's desperate to avoid that. I think we should point out that one of the genius aspects of this story is it's in public the argument is in public but it's also in a different country. So perhaps people would be able to see these people arguing even if they couldn't understand the language they were arguing in. And then on top of that they're at a train station so that this is there is a limited amount of time. So Hemingway has kind of put a stopwatch on this scene. So there's a lot of different elements and layers at work here in just the way that Hemingway has said I mean he could have had them in a living room where they're all by themselves arguing but that's not the case. It would have been a much different story obviously. Oh yeah absolutely and I think you know as I as I said you know a lot of the story does come or the setting of the story does come from that that 1925 sketch so it's you know so he's got it you know he's got that as a ready made right don't you know don't look at gift horse in the mouth but at the same time it absolutely has to be set in something you know in something like like the railway station the time element the time element in this is really really important they've got 40 minutes to figure it out they may have been talking about it or arguing about it you know all the way you know all the way down from Pamplona where I think you know if the informed reader write the one who can see beneath the water line into the iceberg the inform reader knows that they've come from Pamplona there's really no other reason for them you know to be on the rails at that time of year when it's hot they've been to the sand you know to the sand for me I don't know it's almost like something out of Beckett just this bear thing out there you mentioned the word reasonably that which I think is my favorite adverb in the story there aren't many but I want to I want to Russ get you to weigh in on the my second favorite adverb in the story so I think the third most important character is the who waitress and so he says the the train comes in five minutes what did she say asked the girl that the train is coming in five minutes the girl smiled brightly at the woman to thank her so that's a one sentence paragraph with that adverb brightly in there how do you imagine that she is smiling at the waitress she's doing the thing that you know that perhaps most of us do when we don't speak the language we exaggerate physical motions or or expressions to try to communicate you know try to communicate to to somebody thank you please where's the bathroom perhaps I'm biased on on this one I think that you know in addition to being imagined and creative she seems like a genuinely nice person yeah that's I think she's I think she's being I think she's being nice being nice to a person that the American is you know it's treating this treating I don't know like a waitress if if you've ever been in a restaurant and been in the middle of a fight the waitress tends to come over it exactly the wrong time I mean this happens to other people this not me not not me I wouldn't know about this personally but I've heard that if you're out in an argument asking yeah yeah asking for and you slap on that fake smile like brightly and it's very it's very lit because remember we've heard about the word bright before you know wasn't it bright wasn't it bright to talk about the the hell's like what you know I had a lot of that so where it's like and then a lot of it is talking about you know this this aspect of illumination and so forth so okay they were all waiting reasonably for the train he went out through the bead curtain she was sitting at the table and smiled him and then the guy and Russ take us through this last exchange because do you feel better now before we even get to the last line what does the guy coming back and saying do you feel better what is that and what is he really asking I think he's asking her you know again he can't he can't stop right he's asking her if during the time he's been away she's leveled out everything's okay they're gonna get on the train reasonable they're gonna reasonably get on the train and and go together it's just an astonishing level of presumption you know he says exactly the wrong thing right when he comes back oh yeah yeah well he's been saying you know he's been saying I mean he can have a he can have his point of view he can he can say you know things like I you know I'm not ready I wouldn't be good with he's he's entitled to those because those are entirely his his feelings but but just you know just to come back he's been so two degrees been saying his point of view but he's been saying it you know in the wrong overbearing way and this is just like the final you know the final one you know and that's you know I don't you know there you know there's all kinds of speculation out there you know does she eventually have you know terminate the pregnancy does she eventually not does she eventually have the child I you know I don't know but I but I'm I'm positive in that last sentence of dialogue from her that that he's not they're not together anymore she's gone just as just as soon as she gets a place to go what's particularly going about him saying do you feel better is that he had a couple minutes to actually figure out what he you know it's like okay that was a scene that was a maybe I said something they said what could I possibly say he had a minute or two to rehearse he had a drink and then he comes and he lead you know he leads in a in a ridiculous obnoxious way okay so Russ the last line of the story I feel fine she said there's nothing wrong with me I feel fine and again Hemingway this is we've talked about this many times on the show how Hemingway can sometimes end a story or in the case of the Sun also rises even a novel with somebody saying something and it just hovers in the air you're not even told how it said but he ends with a line of dialogue so what do you make of first of all Hemingway giving her the last word but also what she means by what she says I think Hemingway gives her the last word because I think Hemingway likes her a lot of her dialogue about the hills and about the surrounding landscape actually come from Hemingway's own mouth in that 1925 semi autobiographical sketch so he gives her the best lines he gives her his lines you know he's the one that came up with the with the simile you know like you know like white elephants and he gives that to her so I think that you know I think I think she gets the last word because he likes her better than he likes the American and and I just you know again I just I read I read that last line as you know she's she's made her mind up she's you know she's out of there the second that she can get out of there there's nothing you know this he's you know throughout the story you know I know that you won't mind it it's just a little thing it's almost not even an operation you know and then when he goes and looks for people you know looks at people waiting reasonably for the train you know obviously he thinks that she's unreasonable and he's he's pretty much communicated that to her. Through the course of the story, she's made a decision. I don't know about determining the pregnancy, but personally, as her, there's really nothing wrong with her. She's fine. She's in and of herself is fine. She's not this person that the American has been trying to characterize for the last 1499 words. Is she saying there's nothing wrong with me like being pregnant is not a disease, right? There's nothing wrong. Like the state that I'm in, it's natural. It's not, it's not a, it's not inherently a problem. Or is she saying there's nothing wrong with me emotionally, behaviorally, the way I've been the way I am responding to this pregnancy is not wrong? I think it's probably more of the latter. Although, remember, this is an interesting time in medical history. Having ways on father had taken some specialized, specialized coursework and obstetrics. And there's a point in sort of Euro-American medicine when pregnancy goes from being a natural thing actually to being a problem when it becomes medicalized, when it becomes a condition that has to be treated. And, you know, in Hemingway is living through that time. So I think it's really great insight, you know, to connect it up with the sort of debate between the pregnancy as a medical issue or whether it's a natural thing. I think that that's really brilliant. I've always read it more as, you know, emotionally I'm fine. My response to this is all fine. You know, there's really nothing wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with me as a person. That's a great point, Russ. I also like, there's nothing wrong with me. Yeah, that's a good way. At the end of this. Well, yeah, you know, it depends on what inflection you give it. There's nothing wrong with me or there's nothing wrong with me. Yeah. Where you put the stress and the sentence really puts her in two different places. Yeah, she realizes at the end of the story that this guy has overplayed his, you know, where he went so over the top that he's the problem. She hasn't done anything wrong. You know, we were talking about the dialogue and really, there isn't really a moment where Hemingway tells us how somebody says something. It's all left to our ears and the way we're invested in the scene. No, I agree. I mean, it's Robert Paul Lamb is really, really good about, writes really well on how Hemingway uses point of view in short stories. He does a really great thing about Indian camp. But you can just, I mean, you can see the technique and this is one of the things that attracts me to the story. He's just absolutely rigorous in not putting a value anywhere, not putting a word that would give you a sense of how the dialogue is being said or inflected. You get those two little tiny windows into Jigs and the American's consciousness, but just for a second. And the rest of it is just amazing. So maybe you're answering the question that I'm intending to ask as our final consideration of all of Hemingway stories. We mentioned an introduction. Something like Hills like White Elf and seems to be just one that people keep coming back to as, as I said, if you're going to read one story, if it's the most anthologized one, what is it about this? And are you comfortable that this might be a new reader's entry into Hemingway or what they associate with a Hemingway short story? I think it's absolutely representative of Hemingway. There are other stories that one might like as well. Indian Camp is one of my favorites. I think that Indian Camp is one of Hemingway's favorites as well. No, this one just sticks with you. When I was doing the initial work on the story, I wanted to know how hot it was. There's a certain generation of us. They grew up watching late night TV and if somebody says, "How hot the audience would yell?" Well, how hot was it, right? So I went online to the National Oceanographic and the Appostor administration website and picked at sort of random, climate scientists. His first name was Russ, so I figured I might have an end, right? And email to him and asked, "I know that you guys have climate-tological data on major cities in the US, highs and lows." That kind of thing. Do you keep track of that worldwide or do they do that by country? He very nicely answered me back and said, "We do it for the United States. Other countries do it for themselves." I had mentioned in the email that I was interested in temperatures in Pemplona and Zaragoza. In 1925, he said, "Well, Spain is gathering this data, but basically unless you're fluent in Spanish, you're pretty much out of luck." I wrote him back to thank him and said, "I'm working on this Ernest Hemingway story, he'll like white elephants. If you ever hear of a way into that data, I'd appreciate it." He writes back, "Wait a minute. I read that story in college and I remember it. My buddy at the University of Tarragona is right now collecting this data set. Here's the article that's published in a major scientific journal. Tell me what dates you want and what cities you want and I'll get you the information." Years later, because I have no idea how old he is, but he's obviously not just out of college. This is the story that he's read from Hemingway and it's stuck with him. It's stuck with him hard to the point where he's doing favors for somebody he doesn't know. Because we have a mutual interest in the story. How hot was it? When Hemingway was leaving Pemplona that day in 1925, where the story is based on, it's in the '60s. By the time you get down to the Zaragoza plane, you're up into the '80s, ratcheting up toward '90. Here's the part of the iceberg thing. The closer that the couple has gotten to Cacetus, the hotter it's gotten. However the day started, it's become a pressure cooker by the time they hit Cacetus. Russ Pottle, thank you so much for joining us on One True Podcast and talking about hills like wet elephants. This has been great. I've had a great time. Thank you so much. And thanks to you all for listening in. This episode is available on OneTruePod.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Our show is supported by the Hemingway Society, the English Department at the University of Evansville and Florida Gulf Coast University. Join us next time as we continue exploring Hemingway, his life, his work, and his world. Until then, I'm Mark Chirino with Michael Lang Cannon and this is One True Podcast. [Music] [Music] [Music]