Book Review: Ernest Hemingway's "Winner Take Nothing"

Unlike all other forms of lutte or combat the conditions are that the winner shall take nothing; neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notions of glory; nor, if he win far enough, shall there be any reward within himself.

Such is the dedication Ernest Hemingway wrote for WINNER TAKE NOTHING, a grim, cynical, occasionally black-humorous collection of short stories which, if they achieve nothing else, grant us an insight into the author's particular way of looking at the world. Hemingway had a racketing youth that took him all over America and Canada and later, Europe, and the extent of that experience -- as a reporter, an ambulance driver during WWI, a correspondent living in Spain and France, and as a glorified beach bum in Florida -- is reflected in these tales, some of which are now considered classics of American literature. There are some losers in this bunch, and a few more that never quite add up to the sum of their parts, but by and large this collection demonstrates why Hemingway's short stories are still considered masterpieces of observation on the human condition. Some of the standouts are:

"After the Storm" -- An American dockyard thug, having stabbed someone in a bar fight and then fled on a boat, encounters a just-sunken passenger ship after a violent storm and tries to perform a little impromptu salvage.

"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" -- A short, poignant tale about a drunken insomniac in Paris, and the two waiters who wish he'd just go home.

"The Sea Change" - A selfish young man tries to talk his pregnant girl into an abortion. (This tale is significant in that the word "abortion" is never used in the story.)

"A Way You'll Never Be" - This story, set in Italy in WWI after a bloody battle, introduces Nick Adams, a recurring character in Hemingway's shorts who was clearly based upon himself.

"A Day's Wait" -- A black-comic short about a boy who believes he is dying of fever.

"A Natural History of the Dead" -- One of Hemingway's finest short stories, it begins as a cool, almost scientific treatise on death and then deteriorates, quite deliberately, into a personal reminiscence about war.

Love him or hate him, Hemingway was one of the most important writers of the last few centuries, at least in the English-speaking world, if only because of his influence on modern language. Prior to his rise to fame in the 1920s, British-American prose tended toward a more ornate, almost baroque style that tended to favor those with education. Hemingway's own style, very carefully developed under the tutelage of Gertrude Stein, was friendly even to barely literate people, massively increasing his popularity, and his earthy, worldly, cynical take on life, and willingness to tackle subjects hitherto smothered in silence, fit the disillusioned mood of the period in which he found his fame. WINNER TAKE NOTHING is aptly named, because Hemingway's view of life was unremittingly bleak, though punctuated with coarse humor and just a tinge of sentimentality. It is the work of a man who believed that life broke the good and the bad impartially, and that while it may have punished vice, it seldom rewarded virtue. It is the work of a man who believed that victory was difficult to obtain and, having been obtained, inevitably rang hollow. In short, it is the work of a depressive misanthrope with a distinct taste for cruelty. And yet it must be said that Hemingway probably took more pleasure from life than his tough-guy code was willing to let him admit, and his fascination with what George Orwell called "the process of life" -- eating, drinking, fighting, hunting, fishing, traveling, making love -- is part of what makes reading him worthwhile. Man, he once said, can be destroyed but not defeated, and there is enough of that defiant attitude in WINNER TAKE NOTHING to make the reader take something positive away from it -- something, as it were, from Nothing.