Hemingway's Earliest Heroes Nick Adams and Jake Barnes

"I strongly recommend a new book by Don Daiker, Hemingway’s Earliest Heroes: Nick Adams and Jake Barnes, recently published by Innovative Ink Publishing.  I have read the entire book—really, two books in one—and it is a magnificent collection reflecting several decades of Don’s scholarship and close reading of the Nick Adams stories and The Sun Also Rises.  I cannot recommend it too highly.  Don’s exploration of Hemingway’s portraits of Nick Adams and Jake Barnes are illuminating and carefully argued.  For those who have studied under Don, attended his presentations at conferences, followed his publications in a variety of scholarly journals, and/or enjoyed his discussion of the Nick Adams stories on One True Podcast, this book gathers together in one attractive volume his many essays."
John Beall

"I second all that John says about Don Daiker’s new book. A really indispensable collection of essays on Nick Adams and Jake Barnes. Highly recommended!"
Michael Kim Roos

"A powerful collection reflecting forty years of creative scholarship by Donald A. Daiker, Hemingway’s Earliest Heroes offers its readers two books for the reasonable price of one. In the first half of the book, Daiker’s essays build a perceptive portrait of Hemingway’s character, Nick Adams, as his fictional alter ego. Thus, just as James Joyce developed Stephen Dedalus as a fictional alter ego in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, Hemingway composed stories charting Nick’s growth from young boy (“Indian Camp”), to adolescent (“The End of Something” and “The Three-Day Blow”), adult war veteran (“Big TwoHearted River” and “A Way You’ll Never Be”), and father reminiscing about his own father (“Fathers and Sons”). In these stories, Hemingway portrays Nick, flaws and all, as a complex character—at times sensitive and sympathetic, at others confused, self-centered, delirious, and irascible.  In the second half of Hemingway’s Earliest Heroes, Daiker focuses on Jake Barnes, the protagonist of Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises. Jake is a writer, war veteran, traveler, and bullfighting aficionado with a vigorous and enduring moral code. Beginning with “The Affirmative Conclusion of The Sun Also Rises,” an essay originally published in 1974-75 in The McNeese Review, and ending with a forthcoming essay on “Teaching Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as Novel and Film,” Daiker convincingly and repeatedly rebuts a cliché about the novel as a collective portrait of a “lost generation” of expatriate wastrels and drunkards. 

And herein lie two reasons this book is so valuable to readers of Hemingway’s stories and novels. First, the collection gathers together essays that today would be hard to find in back issues of the journals in which they were published. Second, collectively the essays are variations on a theme of defending Hemingway’s Nick Adams and Jake Barnes as affirmative portraits of young men coping with physical and emotional wounds. As Daiker puts it in his introduction, Nick and Jake have developed “recuperative power, the resilience to bounce back from the edge of disaster” (xvii). While making the case that Adams and Barnes are Hemingway’s heroes, the chapters consistently present comprehensive summaries of previous scholarship—often presenting a consensus of views that Daiker thoughtfully challenges. For instance, in the book’s first chapter, Daiker undertakes a defense of Nick’s father, Dr. Henry Adams, in his conduct during an emergency Cesarian section he performs in a remote area of upper Michigan without anesthesia and with improvised equipment—a jackknife and fishing line, or “gut leaders.” The chapter begins with a survey of critics’ indictments of Dr. Adams as a callous and insensitive father whose bedside manner with his patient and with his young son he has brought along can seem cold. Daiker then carefully and persuasively addresses such criticisms, particularly by setting Dr. Adams’s conduct in historical context (a Cesarian section was virtually a new surgery at the time of the story’s setting) and geographical setting. Daiker defends Dr. Adams’s surgical technique as life-saving, both for the mother and for her unborn child. He defends Dr. Adams’s explanation to his young son that the mother’s “screams are not important,” a statement that sounds strikingly different in tone from the caring, sensitive, and honest responses Dr. Adams gives when Nick asks tough questions about death at the end of the story. As Daiker argues, “Perhaps because of his father’s understanding and gentle affection, an episode that begins with Nick’s fear of dying ends with him at peace with himself and his future” (12). 

Likewise, Daiker summarizes the case for the prosecution against Dr. Adams, and then presents a powerful case for the defense in his readings of subsequent Nick Adams stories, such as “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” “Ten Indians,” and “Fathers and Sons.” In his readings of these stories, Daiker emphasizes the warmth, tenderness, and reciprocal affection between Nick and his father. Likewise, he summarizes the views of scholars who criticize Nick’s manner of breaking up with his girlfriend in “The End of Something.” Then Daiker builds toward his conclusion that Hemingway portrays Nick as “a young man who had acted with tact and kindness in breaking up with a young woman he no longer loved but still cared about deeply” (84). Daiker also discusses stories, such as the posthumously published “Summer People,” in which Hemingway portrays Nick as “self-assured and self-satisfied and self-centered” (116). Likewise, in his chapter on “Fathers and Sons,” the final Nick Adams story to appear while Hemingway was alive, Daiker captures the complexity of the story’s portrait of Nick as both son and father with remarkable acuity. 

Arguably the finest chapter in the Nick Adams section of the book is Daiker’s essay on the skiing story, “Cross-Country Snow.” Here several virtues of Daiker’s book stand out. First, he makes very good use of his research in Hemingway’s papers at the John F. Kennedy Library to show how Hemingway revised earlier drafts. In so doing, Daiker develops his reading of “Snow” as “a story focusing on friendship and relationships” (128). Second, he challenges a majority of scholars who have neglected the story in their discussions of Hemingway’s short fiction. He then presents his own view: “My goal is to show that that story is an undisputed masterpiece—fully unified, brilliantly structured, highly significant, and one of Hemingway’s best” (126). Third, out of his close reading of this fine story, Daiker summarizes Hemingway’s “philosophy of life” as well as I have seen in any criticism.    

The eleven chapters in the second half of Hemingway’s Earliest Heroes are variations on a clear and central theme: despite an epigram about the “lost generation,” a phrase quoted from Gertrude Stein, the novel is ultimately an affirmative narrative of Jake Barnes’s growth into an independent, resolute individual. For instance, in “King Solomon, Gertrude Stein, and Hemingway’s ‘Lost Generation,’” Daiker surveys a variety of reviews from when Scribner’s first published The Sun Also Rises on October 22, 1926. Many of the early reviewers latched onto Stein’s phrase to praise or damn the novel’s main characters as “disillusioned and aimless expatriates,” as Conrad Aiken put it in his review (187). More recently Lesley Blume has perpetuated that stereotype of the novel as a “morass of sexual rivalry, gory spectacle, brutal hangovers, and fisticuffs” (188). Indeed, her book’s title, Everybody Behaves Badly, seems to glamorize or sensationalize the novel’s status as a roman à clef—an exposé whose characters are based on recognizable individuals such as Lady Duff Twysden, the model for Lady Brett Ashley. 

Against such an apparent consensus, Daiker’s eleven chapters develop a medley of recurrent arguments showing that Hemingway’s quoting Gertrude Stein about a “lost generation” is highly ironic. First, by closely examining the movements from setting to setting in the novel—within Paris, from Paris to Spain, and between locations in Spain and France—Daiker demonstrates that “On the most basic geographical level, most of the characters are not wandering around aimlessly” (191). He develops that argument most fully in two chapters, “Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: The Centrality of Jake’s Paris” and “‘I Hated to Leave France’: The Geography and Terrain of The Sun Also Rises.” Second, in two central, complex interior monologues, Hemingway takes readers deep inside Jake’s psyche to reveal a solid moral code. In his nocturnal meditations, while he confronts the pain of his war wound, Jake resolves not to let his own problems tarnish others’ lives. Since Jake later recognizes that he essentially acted like a panderer, going against his own moral code, he acts on the obligation he has incurred when he set Brett up to have an affair with a much younger bullfighter. In one scintillating chapter, “One True Sentence,” Daiker explores the importance of a single, simple sentence: “I went in to lunch.” By focusing on the syntax, context, and tone of that sentence, Daiker shows that Hemingway is representing “Jake’s taking personal responsibility for Brett’s trouble—and dealing with it” (288). Thus, Daiker concludes: “This is not a philosophy of futility, meaninglessness, or spiritual dissolution. It is an optimistic, even buoyant view of life that places responsibility for human happiness squarely in human hands” (196). 

Such is the central argument of Hemingway’s Earliest Heroes—developed over the decades beginning with Daiker’s essay “The Affirmative Conclusion of The Sun Also Rises” (published in the mid-1970s). In collecting and organizing his essays, Daiker has chosen to preserve them in their original form. One effect of that decision is that readers will encounter similar arguments about certain key sentences and passages from The Sun Also Rises several times over the course of reading the second section of the book. To an extent, such repetition is welcome, as often the same arguments are developed in a different context from chapter to chapter. For instance, the final chapter, “Teaching Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as Novel and Film,” essentially serves as a conclusion to the section of the book devoted to the development of Jake Barnes as a moral actor. Another effect of Daiker’s decision to preserve the essays in their original form is that two  different versions of the novel are cited. In his earlier essays, such as “Affirmative Conclusion,” Daiker cites the 1926 Scribner’s edition of the novel. In chapters based on more recent essays, such as “King Solomon,” he cites the 2014 Hemingway Library Edition of the novel, also published by Scribner’s. Readers of Daiker’s book should have copies of both editions on hand. 

Both Daiker and the publisher of Hemingway’s Earliest Heroes deserve high praise for the overall design of the book. On the front and back covers are photographs of a young Hemingway with broad smiles as he carries his fishing gear while standing on railroad tracks or while planting his skis in front of a snow-covered, forested mountain landscape. These photographs on the front and back cover serve as visual previews of the book’s emphasis on the characters of Nick Adams and Jake Barnes as positive profiles not just of courage, but of resilience and endurance. Inside the book are carefully selected photographs that complement the discussion of Hemingway’s texts. In short, Donald A. Daiker’s gracefully designed Hemingway’s Earliest Heroes is one of the finest collections of essays I have read on his short fiction and on The Sun Also Rises, his first masterpiece of a novel."
John Beall

"Almost 20 years after retiring from Miami University, Don Daiker is having a moment. In late 2022, Mark Cirino, host of the popular Hemingway Society-sponsored podcast, One True Podcast, introduced his guest as “The man who knows more about Nick Adams and the Nick Adams stories than anyone alive.”

Now Daiker’s most important essays on Ernest Hemingway’s short story alter ego Nick Adams and Jake Barnes from The Sun Also Rises have been collected in one book.

Intimidated by literary essays? Don’t be. Daiker’s essays work on three levels.

If you’re a Hemingway aficionado or you are a want-to-be Hemingway aficionado, Hemingway’s Earliest Heroes is a must for your book shelf. Daiker is not afraid to descent from common Hemingway analyses. For example, two essays defend Nick’s father Dr. Henry Adams. While most scholars describe the character as cold-blooded, castrating, sexist, or racist, Daiker defends him as one who demonstrates the power of love.

In “One True Sentence from The Sun Also Rises,” he begins the essay with “When asked to choose a ‘true sentence … many readers would choose the novel’s famous sentence’ and then Daiker breaks from tradition and proposes a sentence seemingly ordinary. That’s the beauty of Daiker’s scholarship – he sees what others don’t, he reads what others won’t. His theses are products of long thoughtful reflections.

If you have no ambition for Hemingway scholarship, first, shame on you. Second, that’s okay, but do you ever feel guilty that you’re not indulging in classic American literature? It should be on your to-do list like spending less time on social media and learning to identify wines.

Let me offer you an exercise to raise your current level of culture, to dazzle at your next dinner party. Read Daiker’s essay “In Defense of Hemingway’s Young Nick Adams” and then read Hemingway’s short stories “The End of Something” and “The Three-Day Blow.” The practice of pairing an essay with the original text is simply adding the hot fudge and Reddi-wip to your vanilla ice cream.

Interested in re-reading The Sun Also Rises? I suggest “Don’t Get Drunk Jake.” Try reading the book with a focus on drunkenness and sobriety.

Finally, Hemingway’s Earliest Heroes should be required reading for high school and university American literature teachers. Daiker’s reputation for quality classroom teaching was legendary in Oxford, Ohio. He valued his role as teacher more than his role as researcher. His work will elevate the curriculum for any class reading The Sun Also Rises. Start with “Teaching Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as Novel and Film.” The essay serves as a guide to studying the book along with the movie, which will improve the accessibility for high school students across most learning levels. I suggest trying pop-up discussions by creating prompts from the essay “One of the filthiest books of the year,” which explores The Sun Also Rises as a banned book.

Daiker’s voice is friendly and considerate. The essays are void of pompous professor speak that segregates the vast majority of literary essays to university libraries and scholarly communities. Hemingway’s Earliest Heroes is an olive branch to any reader interested in Hemingway by America’s most interesting Hemingway scholar."
J.M. Green, writer and poet, Miami University