Defending Hemingway’s Henry Adams: The Doctor, the Critics, and the Doctor’s Son

Abstract

Defending Hemingway’s Henry AdamsThe Doctor, the Critics, and the Doctor’s Son Donald A. Daiker (bio) Hardly anyone has a kind word for Doctor Henry Adams, the central character of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife.”1 The standard reading of this three-tiered short story, the second Nick Adams story from In Our Time (1925), is that the doctor is ignominiously bested by the Indian Dick Boulton and then humiliated by his wife before escaping into the woods with his young son Nick. Citing intertextual, biographic, and manuscript evidence, I will argue, by contrast, that Doctor Adams provides a compelling example of the same grace under pressure that he had demonstrated in the preceding Nick Adams story, “Indian Camp,” when he performed, under the most primitive conditions and with rudimentary surgical tools, an emergency cesarean operation that saves the life of an Indian mother and her baby.2 I agree with Joseph Flora that Dr. Adams is a “complex man” who has been “frequently misunderstood” by readers more prone to condemn than to understand him.3 Flawed as he may be, Doctor Adams nevertheless emerges from these linked stories as an intelligent, prudent, compassionate, and affectionate if imperfect human being.4 “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” is set in northern Michigan on Walloon Lake, where the Hemingway family journeyed each year from Oak Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, for their summer vacation. Hemingway was “indeed a midwesterner,” Robert Paul Lamb has written, and midwestern values “informed his life and art,” especially the Nick Adams stories set in Michigan.5 The first tier of “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” which comprises more than half the story, focuses on an exchange between Doctor Adams and Dick Boulton, an Indian “half-breed” whom the doctor has hired to cut up logs that had been lost on Walloon Lake log booms [End Page 45] and drifted onto the lake shore fronting the Adams cottage.6 When Dick three times accuses the doctor of stealing the logs and then goads him on by continually calling him “Doc,” Doctor Adams says, “If you call me Doc once again, I’ll knock your eye teeth down your throat.” Dick’s immediate response is, “Oh, no you won’t, Doc.” Dick is “happy” because he was “a big man” and “He liked to get into fights.” The doctor’s response is to turn away and walk up the hill to his cottage.7 For what he says to Boulton and for backing down from a fight, Doctor Adams has been charged with multiple offenses—among them thievery, dishonesty, and cowardice. In “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” literary scholar Robert Gajdusek has written, “the father’s cowardice, lies, and impotence are painfully revealed” along with his “immoral pilfering.”8 The charges of thievery and dishonesty are related because the doctor’s accusers claim that he lies about the logs he has stolen. So let’s examine those claims first. The story’s reliable narrator devotes a long paragraph to explaining how the logs came to land on the Adams lake front. They had been “lost” from log booms and had “drifted onto the beach.” Sooner or later, “if nothing were done about them,” lumbermen rowing along the shore would “spot” them and tow them out into the lake to begin a new boom. “But,” the narrator says, “the lumbermen might never come for them because a few logs were not worth the price of the crew to gather them,” in which case the logs “would be left to waterlog and rot on the beach.” Dr. Adams, we are told, “always assumed” the logs that had drifted onto his property would not be retrieved, and so he hired Indians who lived nearby to cut them up for firewood.9 So is Dr. Adams guilty of theft? At this point in the story it seems a moot point: If the logs were to be reclaimed by the lumbermen, perhaps he would be stealing them; on the other hand, he could hardly be faulted for making practical use of logs that would otherwise decay into uselessness on his property...