The Procrustean Bed. A Critical Study of Philip Young’s Edition of Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories

Philip Young was a scholar at Pennsylvania State University and among the first to publish a book on Ernest Hemingway. Eleven years after Hemingway’s death, Young edited a collection of Hemingway’s works on Nick Adams, a protagonist in many of his short stories. While editing The Nick Adams Stories, Young placed the Nick Adams stories in what he believed to be chronological order. This he did for the common reader to achieve better understanding of Nick Adams as a character. Philip Young’s chronological order of the stories is, however, wrong in some cases. Arranging the Nick Adams stories in a collection calls for them to be taken out of their original context within Ernest Hemingway’s short story collections. Hemingway did not arrange them within his collections by chance. Every word he ever published was placed in a specific location for a specific reason within his works and to re-arrange the order in which Hemingway intended his stories to be read only deflates and neutralises the effect they were intended to have. There are twenty four Nick Adams stories in Young’s collection. Three of them do not mention Nick’s name anywhere and it can be argued that at least one of the three has no evidence of being a Nick Adams story, thus not belonging in the collection at all. Sixteen of the twenty-four stories in the collection were previously published by Hemingway himself but eight of them are fragments and partial stories discovered after his death. To publish what Hemingway himself had already decided not to does his memory a disservice and should have been left alone to honour the decisions he made while he was alive