Ernest Hemingway’s “The Strange Country” – Season 1, Episode 1

Ernest Hemingway’s association with Florida is most commonly defined by his time spent in Key West during the 1930s. However, in “The Strange Country,” published posthumously as part of “The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway,” the protagonist and his much younger girlfriend embark on a road trip odyssey from Miami to New Orleans, stopping in many distinct Florida locales along the way and catching up on news of the Spanish Civil War. In this episode, I’m joined by my brother, John Nank, an erstwhile Hemingway fanboy, to talk about “The Strange Country.”

“This is a wicked stretch of country. It’s old and wicked with lots of law and no justice.”

Further Reading

• “Hemingway Hastily, Carelessly, Chaotically Edited : THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY” by Kenneth Lynn for the LA Times
• “The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway” on Bookshop

Episode Transcript

Christopher Nank: Florida road trip. In this inaugural episode of Florida Book Club, my brother, John Nank, and myself discuss Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published and unfairly overlooked story, “The Strange Country.” Most people associate Hemingway’s life in Florida with Key West. This story about a troubled author and his much younger girlfriend unfolds across the length and width of the state, as they buy a car in South Florida and travel from Miami to New Orleans, stopping to sample the various locales along the way, creating to my mind a vivid picture of the state as it was in the late 1930s. I’m Christopher Nank and welcome to Florida Book Club.

CN: Hello, I’m Christopher Nank, host of Florida Book Club. I’m joined here by my brother, John Nank, and we’re discussing Ernest Hemingway’s criminally underrated story posthumously published, I should add, “The Strange Country.” Before I get your feelings about some things, John, I just want to talk a little bit about “The Strange Country.” It’s a Florida story that is not set in Key West, which is generally how most people tie Hemingway to the state of Florida, is just through his residence in Key West and the stories accounts that he published there. So, you know, it’s interesting to me in that regard. Let me ask you, we’ve discussed this before in the past, but I’d like you to articulate it a little more, are you a Hemingway guy?

John Nank: At this point in my life, I would say I’m less of a Hemingway guy than I have been, or at least in a different way. I think I probably read Hemingway for the first time as like a 16-year-old high school kid and thought, “Wow, this is what a man is.” You know, like this is a celebration of masculinity, an unflinching celebration of masculinity. That was the nineties. I think feelings on masculinity generally have changed. I think the other thing that has changed my perception of Hemingway over time is I became more and more aware of the myth of Hemingway and sort of the legend of Hemingway. I’m interested in your take on this, but two of the things that I think really color my current perception of Hemingway are the portrayals of him in the movies “Midnight in Paris” and “Hemingway and Gellhorn.” And you know, look, I don’t think that’s a fair way for me to perceive him as an author, but it’s impossible not to think of this kind of swashbuckling, you know, like barrel of machismo who would pick fights and drink wine straight from bottles and, you know, take any woman who walked through the door.

JN: And because so much of his writing is clearly autobiographical and his protagonists are, you know, mostly glorified versions of himself or at least the way he saw himself, it’s hard to take him seriously in some ways. And that doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of reading my favorite of his works, even now. But I do have to say, you know, his persona has taken on a life of its own, in my mind at least. And it is hard for me to separate that from his actual literary output. And so that is certainly the case with the story that you asked me to read.

CN: Fair enough. I guess, you know, the persona of Hemingway that comes across in his works is certainly a lot different than the insecure drunk who alienated most of his friends in the literary world, you know, that that was the reality of his life.

JN: How do you pull that off? I’d like that. I mean, I’d like my legacy to be some kind of exaggerated and sugar-coated version of myself. I mean, so you know, fair play to him on that.

CN: Well, you know, something else fair is that I think you kind of see that more insecure side of Hemingway in “The Strange Country,” if we’re reading the story that way, which we’re not entirely going to do. You see that in a lot of his later works like “Across the River and into the Trees,” certainly, and “The Old Man and the Sea.” So, neither take is probably very far off. And I think you probably represent a lot of people’s casual opinions and associations in his work.

CN: Now “The Strange Country,” to be fair, is a posthumous work. It was written, according to the editors of The Complete Stories published in 1987, and I’ll just read the epigram here: “Comprises four chapters of an uncompleted novel that Hemingway worked on in intervals in 1946 to 1947 and 1950 in 1951. They were supposed to be preliminary material for an early version of ‘Islands in the Stream,’ which was published posthumously in 1970.” I’ll go on and say, “Readers will note the reuse of names subsequently given to other characters in the final version of ‘Islands in the Stream.’ None of these rearrangements diminishes the unity and integrity of ‘The Strange Country.'” And like I said, I like it because it’s not a Key West story. It starts in Miami and it goes through this kind of a road trip story going up through the peninsula, all the environs and landscapes and habitats in Florida, and they end up in New Orleans. So it’s really kind of a Gulf Coast travelog in that sense, too.

JN: Let me interrupt you there, because I think for the less pedantic listeners, it might be helpful to talk about Hemingway’s history in Key West specifically. Because I think those of us who were introduced to Hemingway via a required reading list might think of him, you know, his Spanish period or his African period. Talk about that a little bit. I mean, how did he end up in Florida? Is he unique among authors of his generation? And in a way, his writing is very grounded in his geographical location, and that he, at least from my perspective, has these very distinct eras of productivity? That for me, like he has a Paris period and a Spanish period, and, uh, he drank absinthe in Paris. And then in Spain, he drank red wine. And then in Key West, he invented the daiquiri or whatever. And there’s like, you know, he had specific chapters that are very grounded in a place, and I do think that’s interesting asbackground to the conversation we’ll have about “The Strange Country.”

CN: Well, some of the things you were questioning could be book-length treatises, and in fact have been. With Key West specifically, I think the appeal to him — and he was not alone in this, you know, Tennessee Williams, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, there’s tons of authors who are rough contemporaries in that worked in Key West — but it’s important to remember in the 1930s, the main bulk of his time there, that Key West was truly a place apart, even from Florida. The bridges had not been completed, you could only reach it by boat, and it was really a fishing village that a lot of more wealthy and affluent tourists would come and frequent. Even though I think it’s Hemingway’s worst novel, in “To Have and Have Not” you really get some nice portraits of the sort of dissipated people that come down there to fish. I think that was sort of the appeal. I think the proximity to Cuba, where he also had a house really appealed to him and he went to Bimini quite a bit on his boat. So I think those were probably, it was manifold in that way.

CN: This story starts in Miami, in Coral Gables. So, I was intrigued by that, that it doesn’t even touch on the isolation. It’s much more connected to mainland Florida obviously, than any of his other stories, which, you know, could be set on any island for most part. Even though again, he does pretty indelibly describe Key West at that, that time period during the Depression.

CN: I think what’s neat about this Los Angeles Times review that was published on my birthday in 1987, by Kenneth Lynn, LA Times book critic at the time, he talks kind of derisively about some of the posthumous works of Hemingway like, “Islands in the Stream” and “The Garden of Eden.” He alludes to the publisher’s note from “The Garden of Eden,” which says “In every significant respect, the work is all the authors.” And then he goes on to say, “But what is left unsaid is that without the drastic surgeries on the texts performed behind the scenes by a professional writer and editor, only Hemingway scholars would have had the stamina and plowed through the book,” which I don’t know, made me laugh a little bit. And he says, “The title page of this new edition of Hemingway’s stories, ‘The Collected Complete Short Stories,’ does not give credit to anyone for having taken charge of editing the volume. Quite possibly no one really did, for the book is quite mindlessly organized, especially as regards chronology.” He also goes into talking specifically about “The Strange Country.” He said, “All told, the edition contains seven previously unpublished works of fiction. Without exception, they are literarily inconsequential, and only one has biographical value,” and singles out “The Strange Country.” He devotes two paragraphs to talking about the biographical aspects of it, which I think are kind of superfluous, honestly. And then Kenneth Lynn concludes by saying “The stories he subsequently wrote had a like importance to this dedicated, tormented man, and they deserved a more scrupulous edition than they have received from the caretakers of his legacy.” So, you know, not, not very flattering.

CN: I think I really do not like posthumous works. They could be Ernest Hemingway, it could be Tupac Shakur. Anything that’s released after an artist has died, I am immediately suspect of, and I’m thinking this is more of the work of associates or editors or people who were making the work into what they wanted it to be, rather than any real work of the authors.

JN: Okay. My favorite posthumous work, because I’ve given this some thought, is the album “From a Basement on the Hill” by Elliot Smith, which, I believe was released maybe a year after his suicide..

CN: Or whatever happened to him…

JN: Right. And it was the only of his albums that really was released during the time where I was very aware of him as an artist. So for me, there is some nostalgic value, as well. I’m sure there are Elliot Smith purists who, and I don’t know how much overlap there is among that audience and your audience of this podcast. But if anyone is listening, I’m sure they would be horrified to hear me say that that album is my favorite, but it’s got some great songs. I just thought I’d contribute that in defense of posthumous works.

CN: Okay. No, fair enough. I get the sense that Kenneth Lynn, the then LA Times book critic, was not a fan of them, as he describes Hemingway’s widow and Scribner’s laughing all the way to the bank on all of these posthumous works. So at least as regards the author we’re discussing today, he takes a fairly dim view of them.

CN: What did you think about this story broadly speaking?

JN: Well, you quoted Kenneth Lynn, I believe, using “stamina” as a quality that was required to complete “The Garden of Eden.” And I kind of had a similar feeling about this story, which compared to some completed Hemingway short stories really felt more like a novella. But I have to say, from a narrative standpoint, I’m really curious, having really endured the length of this version, what ended up on the cutting room floor during the editing process. Because I really felt at any point after the protagonists had departed Miami, you might’ve put a period and just called it quits at that point. And I was really hoping for it. I have to say it was a bit of a slog. I am excited to discuss with you the representations of some of the maybe underrepresented, areas of the state of Florida that I know that you feel like he represented very faithfully.

JN: For me, I was really interested in the character development, or lack thereof to be honest with you. And I do think to what you’ve said earlier, there were some moments where we got a sense for maybe some of the real-life Hemingway’s sense of mortality or insecurity setting in. I have to say, I’m really interested in, as I’ve gotten older and sat with Hemingway for longer, I’ve started thinking more about his portrayal of, of his female characters, where, you know, he is not just… Well, I think there may be some of his female characters that he’s still sort of written in his own mold, but at least he maybe feels more license to create a character that is not just a representation of himself within a context.

JN: This was a strange story for me. After a certain point, I started to just feel like I was reading a version of “Lolita” that I cared less for and characters in the same story that I cared less for. I thought the character positioning, the character development, and what I consider to be a relatively flat arc from a narrative standpoint was notable. In fairness to Hemingway, this may have been the first three chapters of a 20-chapter novel that he may never have intended that to see the light of day. Certainly he did not intend it to see the light of day in its current form. So I won’t hold that against him. But I kind of felt like it was a bit of an endurance sport to get through this.

CN: Wow, “Lolita”? But Roger, the protagonist, he’s like 39. And Helena, she’s 22. They’re adults, and Roger’s not a murderous pedophile. But hey, you know, maybe the applications are you tell him, I mean,

JN: Well, what did you think? I would love for you to share your general reflections, but I thought the relationship between those two characters was frankly the only interesting thing, and really their interactions with the more tangential or incidental characters throughout the story were interesting. There’s something weird going on between these two characters, in my opinion. And I don’t know what it is. And I agree, Humbert Humbert, I dunno, maybe was he in his fifties or something? I mean, obviously it was a much older man.

CN: I can’t remember her name, what her actual name in the novel was, but the character, Lolita, but she was like 13 or something. This a story about two adults traveling.

CN: As a road trip story, I thought it was kind of neat, even though it’s fairly uneventful in terms of just stopping in towns and stopping in motels and him reminiscing. When you talk about it being biographical, I’ll get this out of the way. If you’ve never read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “Babylon Revisited,” I thought it was an interesting companion piece to that story. Because in that story, Charlie, Fitzgerald’s protagonist, is going back to Paris. It’s during the Depression. A lot of his old haunts are closed. He’s lost custody of his daughter. He’s trying to sober up. All the good times are gone. Everything is just a ghost of what it used to be. And I kinda thought Hemingway with some of these descriptions here, you know, where he was really evoking some of that, too, with this character, Roger. You know, that “Oh, things used to be great.” And the story is set in the 1930s. We should say, it’s set in the late thirties, just to judge from the Spanish Civil War details. So, he almost seems like he’s reminiscing on his marriage and how much better Florida was back then, you know, and how much, you know, this is just kind of a pale ghost of what he went through. So from a character standpoint, I guess, that was what I took away from it, kind of Hemingway’s own meditation on the fleeting, the mortality of the 1920s and how fun that was. It just, you know, wasn’t fun anymore.

CN: I will admit I’m a sucker for ecological imagery and landscape descriptions. So that’s mainly what I took away. The setting details, some of these bits when they leave Miami and he said, “The road stretched flat and heat wedded across what had once been the Everglades.” You know, I mean, almost, you know, there, there’s almost an eco-critical aspect to that, like the development of the Everglades, for a story that was written in the late forties was pretty impressive. And the road he had driven so many times in his life, you know, a double meeting there. I liked, as well, talking about the beach, “The beach was white sand almost as fine as flour and ran for miles,” and he’s talking about how it compares favorably to European beaches. “The monotonous pine and scrub Palmetto of the cattle country,” when they’re away from the sea. And then “the long black highway North through the prairie and the pines, into the hills of the lake country, the roads striped black over the long, varied peninsula heavy with the mounting summer heat now that they were away from the sea breeze.”

CN: To a degree, it reminds me of a lot of the imagery that he used in “A Farewell to Arms” and “The Sun Also Rises,” when they were traveling through Spain and Italy and France. And full disclosure, I wrote a lot about those novels in my doctoral dissertation. So I remember this pretty vividly, but I kind of tied in those novels that sort of burned over, like the landscape changes were sort of equated to me with like war wounds and then psychological damage from war. And here, I think there’s something similar, but it’s not quite as traumatic. You know, it’s just more, “This is a past that I’m looking at.” He’s reminiscing about killing turkeys and rattlesnakes and things. He seems to be focusing more, Roger that is, on things that happened to him in the past when he’s traveling with his wife and kids in Florida, rather than what’s happening. You know, in that respect, you’re kind of right about the character arc being kind of flat. Like Helena just seems like a placeholder in that way. Like he’s not focusing so much on what he’s doing with her, except in these very dialogue-driven parts that could have been lifted from “Hills Like White Elephants” in some degree. “Big Two Hearted River,” also, the burned over landscape with all those big black grasshoppers. And it kind of evoke that like Hemingway does that a lot, though. And again, he got me with that, you know. The pines that were scored and tapped for turpentine in the pine country. I liked it.

JN: Well, speaking of “Big Two Hearted River,” you know I’m a resident of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. I’ve never heard it said before, but maybe the Upper Peninsula, where that story was set, could be called the Key West of Michigan. I don’t know. I’m sure that when Nick Adams visited the Two Hearted River, that it was not nearly… Well, actually the Upper Peninsula is still only accessible from where I am from a single bridge. But I think that Hemingway has always had the landscape descriptions, the evocative retelling of a place and scene, and particularly natural landscape has always been something that he’s been great at. And he has something of a reputation as sort of a naturalist, maybe.

CN: One of my high school English teachers lumped him in with Steinbeck and Dreiser and Stephen Crane and Jack London, you know, which I’ve sort of come to reject. I think that those authors view human nature much differently than Hemingway does.

CN: I was reading part of “Big Two Hearted River” there. The first two paragraphs of the first part of that story are all about the burned over landscape of this town. Fire has left no trace of the 13 saloons, even the surface has been burned off it. And with Nick Adams, he’s a war veteran, too, coming home. So there’s that sort of, using the landscape as a metaphor for his psychological state in some ways.

JN: Let me ask you something about the portrayal of Central Florida as portrayed in “The Strange Country.” If you could transport yourself to the thirties, to the setting of this story. We have Roger, who, extrapolating from what we know about him from the text of the story, is a worldly and cultured sophisticate of some kind, and is traveling through the heart of Florida, the Tamiami Trail, I think, across the state and up the Gulf Coast. What do you make of his portrayal of the characters and towns of Florida in that era, and given your experience living in several locales within the state, has it changed at all? Or do you feel it’s a fair and consistent retelling of what that experience would be like?

CN: Well, I can speak from my more recent experience than the 1930s, but yeah, some of those are spot on. If you drive through Florida, off of the turnpike or the interstates, you’ll drive through towns exactly like that, that seem to be isolated in the middle of this almost jungle-like vegetation and rivers and waterways and stuff, and seem very insulated from a lot of the more urbane areas. I imagine that’s probably been true since the state was settled. Once you get away from the coasts, even like you saw it in the story, this is still true. Even parts of the northern Gulf Coast of Florida, you get these tiny beach towns, especially once you get north of Tampa on the Gulf Coast, that are still very tiny, very much their own communities, and then not tied to any sort of metro area or tourist location other than what’s offered by the the Gulf itself.

JN: See, I think even my question, it betrays this idea that… It’s hard for me to interpret this as a work of fiction, given what we know about the biographical details that have always really seeped into Hemingway’s literary work. I’m asking you about his portrayal of Central Florida as though this is a work of journalism. And maybe that’s an unfair frame to even approach the story from.

CN: Well, I should say upfront, I’m not really a Hemingway scholar. I’m not going to purport to be any huge expert on his life or works outside of a very narrow context. But as far as I know, I’m not really aware of where else he traveled in Florida. I don’t know if he ever went to Tallahassee, as in the story or the Gulf Coast near Fort Myers, as is also alluded to where they stayed their first night after leaving Miami. So whether he’s taking artistic license or whether these are based on his own travels, I don’t really know, honestly.

JN: I think that general knowledge of his life experience and the extent to which his life experience comes through in his works of fiction, it can be easy to hold his works of fiction to a historical and factual standard that we may not hold other authors to. And so for my reading of this, I kept thinking that I really liked these characters that they meet along the road on their way to new Orleans.

CN: They were more interesting than the protagonist?

JN: In a way. Yeah. And we could get into that probably.

CN: They’re not the type of people that generally appear in Hemingway stories in major roles.

JN: No, But again, I couldn’t help but thinking, the anecdote that Roger shares about his manuscripts being lost, which is a story that we know — if you’ve read “A Moveable Feast” — is something that has happened to Hemingway in his life, there are certain things that are based in fact. And so for me, it was difficult to not interpret his portrayal of these towns and landscapes as some work of objective journalism, when this is a work of fiction. And I think that artistic license should be expected. But it’s difficult for me as a reader and certainly further from a Hemingway scholar that you to kind of separate those two, I guess.

CN: So you mentioned a line in there that you really liked, and I kind of laughed at it, too, because I had noted it.

JN: In one of Roger’s many bouts of mansplaining…

CN: You find that a lot in Hemingway, too, often to other men.

JN: Everybody’s the smartest guy in the room in Hemingway. At a certain point in the journey, Roger remarks to Helena, “This is a wicked stretch of country. It’s old and wicked with lots of law and no justice.” And that turn of phrase, “lots of law and no justice,” if there’s nothing else that I will ever remember from this story, and probably not, it will be that turn of phrase, which I think, man… If ever it were more resonant than, you know, when Roger uttered those words, today would be that day. It just feels like, yeah, it just struck me and it was the one piece of wordplay that stuck out to me.

CN: Yeah. And then he remarks to her, “You ought to buck Florida politics sometime and see what happens,” to which she replies, “Is it really bad?” “You couldn’t believe it, he said.” Yeah. That’s certainly true in the 21st century, as well.

CN: And finally, did this seem unfinished or lacking in focus or unity? Would you disagree with the publisher’s and editor’s epigram that none of these rearrangements affects the unity or quality?

JN: Yeah, like I said, I feel like it’s too late to give a spoiler alert at this point in our conversation, but without revealing precisely how the story concludes, I don’t know that it ended in a spot that was anymore resolved than it would have been if the story were half that length. I couldn’t help but wonder whether Hemingway intended for this story to just be a cross-country road story where we consider it today a work of Floridana, because with the exception of the final phase, which ends in new Orleans, takes place within the state of Florida, it had been intended and envisioned as a sort of coast-to-coast jaunt, that we would get these colorful characters and anecdotes from states throughout middle America and the West Coast. And so in that way it felt no less unfinished to me. I’ll ask you a question though, Hemingway could write a 400-page novel and publish any 15 pages of it as a short story and we would be left to interpret the remainder of that. You know,I feel like there’s clearly a prologue to the story of Roger and Helena that we do not get.

CN: Yeah, it’s only hinted at.

JN: So I can’t fault the work as presented posthumously for not necessarily having a clean and tidy resolution, either. So I wouldn’t say that it feels unfinished. It felt directionless to me, I think, is what I would say.

CN: All right. And on that note, “The Strange Country.” Ernest Hemingway. It’s available in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.

JN: I don’t know that anything in this conversation is encouraging people to pick up “The Strange Country.”

CN: I feel like I was pretty encouraging! If, like me, you enjoy landscape imagery, you like evocations of old Florida, if you like road trip stories… I know I’m really trying to grasp at straws here to endorse it outside of my own narrow tastes, perhaps. But, I think outside of Hemingway scholars or students of Florida literature, if you like Hemingway’s style, or if you like very simple, strong characterizations, that maybe don’t have a complete arc… Yeah, you’re right. I guess that sounds like a pretty tepid endorsement.

JN: Faint praise!

CN: Indeed. All right. Well, John Nank, thank you for joining me from Ann Arbor. Anyone out there, if you have any comments, replies, rebuttals, suggestions, any ideas of your own to add, please let me hear them. FloridaBookClub.com. We’ll see you next time.