INDIAN GIVING
He bent over the
Indian woman. She was quiet now and her eyes were closed. She looked very pale.
She did not know what had become of the baby or anything.
“I’ll be back in the morning,” the
doctor said, standing up. “The nurse should be here from St. Ignace by noon and
she’ll bring everything we need.”He was feeling exalted and talkative as football players are in the dressing room after a game.
“That’s one for the medical journal, George,” he said. “Doing a Caesarian with a jack-knife and sewing it up with nine-foot, tapered gut leaders.”
Uncle George was standing against the wall, looking at his arm.
“Oh, you’re a great man, all right,” he said.
In this passage from Ernest
Hemingway’s “Indian Camp”—one of the opening short stories in his debut
collection, In Our Time (1925)—the
reader immediately senses the feeling of accomplishment experienced by a skilled
doctor after successfully performing a life-saving operation in unfavorable
circumstances. The life of a Native
American woman is in jeopardy due to complications during labor. But she is rescued and her child safely delivered
thanks to the intervention of Dr. Adams, the father of the young Nick Adams, a
character in the story who appears throughout In Our Time at different stages of his life.
As
in many of Hemingway’s stories, the language and sentences of “Indian Camp” seem
very simple at first, though some words and references require
clarification. The first reference that might
draw one’s attention is “St. Ignace,” the French name of a Catholic saint—St.
Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits—which is
used in the story to identify a hospital or charitable institution in the area. Next is the word “Caesarian,” which obviously
refers to the operation being performed on the Native American woman (or “Indian”
woman) in the story. Like the name of the
hospital, a “Caesarian” or “Caesarian section,” is named after an eponymous
figure—in this case, Julius Caesar—someone who was supposedly delivered as a
child by the same method being used by Dr. Adams (in antiquity the mothers
always died, however). Finally, in the very
same sentence in which “Caesarian” appears, the reader notices the “nine-foot,
tapered gut leaders,” a more obscure, technical term that refers to the kind of
front line attached to the bait in fly fishing and which is here being used as a
substitute for conventional surgical thread.
It was made of cat gut, a strong fiber that was harder for fish to sever
when they bit on it. This reference to
fly fishing might also be an indication of why the doctor, his son, Nick, and
his brother, George, happened to be on the lake when the woman in the Indian
camp was giving birth.
So
what, exactly, is being said in this passage?
The brief, opening paragraph presents the doctor standing over the
sleeping figure of the woman after he has successfully performed the delivery
of her child. She is unconscious and
exhausted. Her paleness suggests how
close to death she has come, but might also seem ironic, as she is a Native
American, the opposite of a so-called “pale face,” a term that was supposedly used
by “Indians” to refer to white people, but which, as an English expression, was
actually only attributed to “Indians” by whites—the people whose arrival in the
New World ensured that native peoples such as the pregnant woman would be
living in such places as the “Indian camp” or shanty town in which the reader finds
them. Nonetheless, the exhausted woman
now seems at peace after her ordeal, if also oblivious to her child and her
surroundings. On straightening up, the doctor states that he
will be back in the morning and that a nurse from St. Ignace will arrive by
noon with more medical supplies, presumably better ones than those available
during the actual delivery.
At this point, the
reader comes to a crucial statement in the passage. Having successfully completed his mission,
the doctor feels “exalted” and “talkative,” much as a football player might feel
after a successful ball game.
Hemingway’s comparison of the doctor to athletes talking in a locker
room after winning a game is significant, both in this particular story and in
the collection as a whole, partly because it zeroes in on the heightened
emotions experienced after performing a task, sport, or art very well and shows
the exhilarating sense of empowerment such an achievement brings, especially one
that is accomplished with difficulty or at great risk. Dr. Adams’ successful operation is clearly
such an example, though in most circumstances the procedure would be considered
routine. The doctor makes this clear by
calling it “one for the medical journal” and describing the extreme conditions
in which he managed to pull it off—using a common jack-knife and sewing up the
mother with gut leaders. As mentioned
above, the fishing leaders were made of gut, which was also used to make
strings on a guitar or tennis racket, for instance. There might also be a funny pun here,
considering that the “gut leader” is also being used to sew up a woman’s belly
or “gut.” The doctor himself becomes a sort of “gut leader,” using his best
instincts (another connotation of “gut”) and meager resources to prove he is a
master surgeon.
Finally, the
doctor’s brother, George, is seen standing against the wall and looking at his
arm, which was previously bitten by the woman in her agony, an act which caused
him to call her a “damn squaw bitch,” thus highlighting, perhaps, some of the
racial antagonisms that remained between whites and Native Americans at this
particular juncture of American history (to say nothing of gender antagonisms). George confirms that his brother is indeed a
“great man.” In this way, the passage
puts a point on the earlier references to other great men in history, like St.
Ignatius or Julius Caesar, though it does so in a subtle, indirect way. (Note that in the process, women’s roles—even
in losing their lives while giving birth—are subtly disparaged.) Ironically, his success as a doctor cannot prepare
Dr. Adams for the surprise awaiting him and everyone else when they discover
that another, very bloody, operation was being performed in the upper bunk of
the same bed at the same time as the Caesarian section being performed below: the husband of the “squaw” is found with his
throat slit open, an apparent suicide. No
longer feeling exalted, the doctor now regrets having brought his young son for
this lesson in human endeavor and survival.
With the suicide it has become a much darker lesson about death, desperation,
and maybe injustice, too—not exactly the lesson one might want a son to learn
at such a young age (though the doctor was willing enough to risk letting him
see a mother die).
What
carries over from this passage to the collection as a whole is the theme of
performing well, showing one’s skill or mastery under pressure, but also showing
a determination to adhere to a code of excellence even in situations of great stress
and potential disaster. In doing this,
one avoids emotional sloppiness, false sentiment, and making pledges one cannot
keep (I think this may be the reason Dr. Adams tells his son earlier on that
the woman’s screams are not important, though it seems a rather heartless thing
to say). Everything depends on knowing
the rules of the game or the techniques of one’s art, and although winning
brings a feeling of exuberance, one might just as easily lose according to the same
rules by which one sometimes wins. The
references to football and fishing are simple indicators of fairly ordinary activities
or items. They imply that if one adheres
to the rules of the game, remembers one’s training, or simply applies one’s
knowledge as best one can (even in unusual circumstances), one is likely to come
out a winner.
But even great
persons can fail in the best of circumstances; human beings and society are
such that even those with the best of intentions can often go wrong or lose
heart. Life itself is sloppy and people
inscrutable, their motives unknowable.
One cannot say why the husband of the Indian woman killed himself: “He couldn’t stand things, I guess,” says Dr.
Adams later on. Some things can’t be
stood: whether it is the screams of a
woman in labor or the injustice of living in an Indian camp utterly dependent
on one’s white masters. Later, Nick
Adams will fight in the trenches in the so-called “Great War” of Europe (1914-1918). Yet no matter how much integrity or faith in
his cause an individual soldier might have, many will come away with the sense
that the entire conflict was a farce revealing the hollowness of “great men”
and the great myths (of God, country, and honor) such men foist upon the rest
of society. In retrospect, the war will seem
more like an act of collective madness or suicide. After returning home from Europe, Nick seeks
isolation from the messiness of social entanglements and tries to find solace
in the simpler values of being a good sport, as shown on the “big two-hearted
river” where he fishes for trout at the end of In Our Time. At one point
the text indicates that he is trying to recuperate the old feeling of
performing well, of winning fair and square, in a sport that pits one against
another, or a lone man against a river.
The theme of good
sportsmanship also suggests a sort of writer’s code or “aesthetic” that Hemingway
consistently adheres to, an aesthetic that demands clarity and honesty and
disdains flashiness and rhetoric—false drama. His stories present, with a stark simplicity
and realism, difficult truths and lives that do not lend themselves to the sort
of moral commentary or grand pronouncements many seem to demand of fiction. Instead, his stories quietly ask the reader
to judge the situation based on the facts of the case, on the most direct or
fitting description in a clear and simple language. It is a language that means more by saying
less—though in saying less, it also risks incomprehension, risks provoking the
stupidity of the crowd.
