Finding His Voice: Hemingway’s in our time, Part 2
By Craig Mindrum
In my first blog [CM1] on Hemingway’s early book, in our time (1924) I wrote that the short vignettes within the book show how Hemingway’s distinctive voice was forming.
Where did that style come from? One profound influence was his work as a reporter for the Kansas City Star when he was 18. Though he only stayed seven months, the paper’s style guide—favoring short sentences, active verbs, and ruthless clarity—became the foundation of his literary voice. He later said it was “the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing.”
Hemingway also wrote for the Toronto Star and was sent to postwar Turkey and the Balkans as a foreign correspondent. He didn’t cover the fighting directly, but he witnessed the humanitarian disaster after the Turkish army recaptured Smyrna (İzmir). His dispatches from Constantinople and Thrace describe:
Refugee columns in retreat
Executions and forced deportations
The emotional numbness of survivors
These war impressions—fragmentary, unspeakable, raw—echo powerfully in the short, violent vignettes of in our time. This version doesn’t just preview Hemingway’s mature voice. It shows the intellectual and emotional labor of creating that voice.
Several of the vignettes deserve closer attention.
Chapter 6: The execution of six enemy cabinet ministers
Part of the horror of these stories comes from Hemingway telling us terrible events in a dispassionate voice. Here six Austrian military leaders are killed by firing squad in the middle of a rainstorm. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid and the soldiers could not get him to stand up, so he “sat down in a pool of water.” Finally the soldiers’ commanding officer “told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up.” The story concludes abruptly: “When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.”
That being said, some of the sentences in this chapter read as if they were the parodies of Hemingway’s style that appeared after the author became famous:
There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut.
In his more mature style, Hemingway knew how to mix these cold journalistic sentences with other forms of explication in a more rhythmic way that was slightly more pleasing to the ear.
Chapter 17: Another execution
This chapter describes the 1921 hanging of five men (including three Black men) for unknown crimes at six o’clock in the morning in Cook County jail in Chicago. One was Sam Cardinella, a Chicago mobster. They carried Cardinella out to the gallows and held him up. “When they came toward him with the cap to go over his head Sam Cardinella lost control of his sphincter muscle. The guards who had been holding him up dropped him. They were both disgusted.”
This is followed immediately by a bit of breezy chitchat by the men present. “’How about a chair, Will’ asked one of the guards, ‘Better get one,’ said a man in a derby hat.”
This detail packs a wallop by what Hemingway did not say: That here we have a supposedly upper-class man (who would have been wearing such a hat) observing the executions for sport. He’s an indifferent spectator, possibly representing polite society’s sanitized interest in public punishment.
This vignette continues Hemingway’s theme of death stripped of ceremony. There's no romanticism, no redemption — just the mechanical finality of execution. Cardinella is treated with almost clinical detachment, enhancing the emotional force of the scene.
Chapter 5: A parody of the aristocracy
This chapter opens with unusual language for Hemingway, filled with needless adjectives: “It was a frightfully hot day. We’d jammed an absolutely perfect barricade across the bridge.” And later, as they shot enemy soldiers trying to climb over, “It was absolutely topping.”
One might think Hemingway had suddenly become too expressive until one realizes this is not his narrative voice, but rather a deliberate parody of another voice — in this case, the affected, slang-laden banter of British soldiers reminiscing about colonial or wartime violence.
Hemingway mimics the cheerful, clipped idiom of British officers — the kind who might have served in colonial wars or World War I— casually describing executions or shootings in terms like “jolly good” and “what a lark.” The juxtaposition of this lighthearted tone with the horrifying content — killing helpless men — creates intense irony. The soldiers treat murder as sport.
The unusual use of adjectives like “jolly,” “awfully,” “perfectly topping” is not Hemingway losing control of his style. Rather, it’s him highlighting the obscenity of euphemistic language in the face of brutality. In these few lines, Hemingway skewers the self-satisfied narratives of imperial war-making. The casualness of the British voices emphasizes the moral numbness and inhumanity bred by long exposure to violence and power.
Because Hemingway does not editorialize, the reader has to do the moral work. He doesn’t say, “These men are monsters.” Instead, he lets their words reveal the dissonance. It’s a classic example of his “iceberg theory” — letting the horror float just beneath the surface.
Chapter 8: Empty promises
In this chapter, Hemingway describes a bombardment during which a man prays to be saved:
Oh jesus christ get me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please please christ. If you’ll only lee me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say. I believe in you and I’ll tell everyone in the world that you are the only thing that matters. Please please dear jesus.”
Though the next night “he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.”
It’s brief, but like so many of Hemingway’s vignettes, it delivers a deep psychological and spiritual punch. Hemingway captures a universal and uncomfortable reality — the instinct to bargain with God in moments of crisis, only to discard those promises when safety returns. This isn’t just about a soldier; it’s about us.
The soldier’s plea is sincere in the moment, but it’s hollow — driven by fear, not transformation. There's an implicit critique of the shallow religiosity that surfaces in emergencies but fails to change behavior.
The final line — “And he never told anybody” — is devastating. It suggests a permanent rupture in the soldier’s moral life, possibly a symptom of trauma, cowardice, or the general corrosion of war. Unlike traditional religious narratives where the cry to Jesus leads to redemption, here it leads only to shame and self-deception. Grace is invoked but never received or honored.
*****
In an upcoming blog, Dr. Nancy Sindelar will write about the edition of In Our Time that was published the next year (1925), where the vignettes are woven into transitional pieces between his short stories.