“Top-hole” in Hemingway's A WAY YOU’LL NEVER BE

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKeywords: “A Way You'll Never Be”Ernest HemingwayNick Adams Notes 1. See Hurley 1980. The wordplay on topping has become such a standard part of the literature that it is often cited without reference to the original author or place of publication. 2. “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” was published in 1936 in Cosmopolitan and again in 1938 in The Fifth Column and The First Forty-Nine Stories; “A Way You’ll Never Be” was printed in 1933 in Winner Take Nothing. Both stories were reprinted in 1987 in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, The Finca Vigía Edition—the edition cited in this article. 3. Not all wordplay in Hemingway's works, of course, conveys ulterior meaning. To cite two well-known examples: Harry's comments to Helen in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”—that “ ‘Your damn money was my armour. My Swift and My Armour’ ” and “ ‘Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry’ ” (Hemingway 43)—are straightforward. As the standard bibliographies reveal, Hemingway's wordplay throughout his canon has received considerable attention. 4. See Plimpton 1958.