On the Quai at Smyrna

Short story by Ernest Hemingway

"On the Quai at Smyrna" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway, first published in the 1930 Scribner's edition of the In Our Time collection of short stories, then titled "Introduction by the author".^[1] Accompanying it was an introduction by Edmund Wilson. Considered little more than a vignette, the piece was renamed "On the Quai at Smyrna" in the 1938 publication of The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories.^[2] When In Our Time was reissued in 1955, it led with "On the Quai at Smyrna", replacing "Indian Camp" as the first story of the collection.^[3]

Summary

The story is set in Smyrna in 1922 during the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War.^[1] A narrator describes the evacuation of refugees,^[4] where naval troops – possibly British^[1] – arrive to impose order at the docks. The narrator says about the civilian refugees, "The worst thing was … how they screamed every night at midnight. I do not know why they started screaming. We were in the harbor and they were on the pier and at midnight they started screaming."^[5] The narrator tells of the women who have dead infants and refuse to give them up for six days and that his men had to take them away. He mentions "the Turk", who is unpredictable, whose orders prevent rescuing the refugees. His men could have taken the pier, explains the narrator: "They would have blown us out of the water but we would have blown the town simply to hell."^[6] He asks his audience, "You remember the harbor. There were plenty of nice things floating around it. That was the only time in my life I got so I dreamed about things."^[6] The women who give birth were not as bad as the dead babies, he says; those women only need a dark place and a blanket. About the evacuation he says, "The Greeks were nice chaps too. When they evacuated they had all their baggage animals they couldn't take off with them, so they just broke their forelegs and dumped them in the shallow water."^[6]

Analysis

Hemingway critic Thomas Strychacz says that in "On the Quai at Smyrna" Hemingway "explores not the clarity but the terror of events that rupture the boundary of what is rational and comfortably known."^[4]

References

^ ^a ^b ^c Oliver (1999), 251
^ Hagemann (1983), 43
^ Reynolds (1995), 49
^ ^a ^b Strychacz (1996), 60
^ Hemingway (1930), 11
^ ^a ^b ^c Hemingway (1930), 12

Sources

Oliver, Charles. (1999). Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work. New York: Checkmark Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8160-3467-3
Hagemann, E. R. (1983). "'Only Let the Story End as Soon as Possible': Time-and-History in Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time". in Michael Reynolds, (ed). Critical essays on Ernest Hemingway's In our time. Boston: G. K. Hall. ISBN 978-0-8161-8637-2
Hemingway, Ernest. (1930) In Our Time. (1996 ed). New York: Scribner. ISBN 978-0-684-82276-1
Reynolds, Michael. (1995). Hemingway's 'In Our Time': The biography of a Book. in Kennedy, Gerald J. (ed). Modern American Short Story Sequences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-43010-4
Strychacz, Thomas. (1996). "In Our Time, Out of Season". in Donaldson, Scott (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-45479-7

External links

Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK Library

Ernest Hemingway

Bibliography

Novels

The Torrents of Spring (1926)
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
To Have and Have Not (1937)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Nonfiction

Death in the Afternoon (1932)
Green Hills of Africa (1935)

Posthumous

A Moveable Feast (1964)
Islands in the Stream (1970)
The Dangerous Summer (1985)
The Garden of Eden (1986)
True at First Light (1999)
Under Kilimanjaro (2005)

Short stories

"Up In Michigan" (1921)
"Indian Camp" (1924)
"The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" (1925)
"The End of Something" (1925)
"The Three-Day Blow" (1925)
"The Battler" (1925)
"A Very Short Story" (1925)
"Soldier's Home" (1925)
"The Revolutionist" (1925)
"Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" (1925)
"Cat in the Rain" (1925)
"Out of Season" (1925)
"Cross Country Snow" (1925)
"My Old Man" (1925)
"Big Two-Hearted River" (1925)
"Banal Story" (1926)
"Today is Friday" (1926)
"A Canary for One" (1927)
"Fifty Grand" (1927)
"Hills Like White Elephants" (1927)
"The Killers" (1927)
"The Undefeated" (1927)
"Che Ti Dice La Patria?" (1927)
"In Another Country" (1927)
"Now I Lay Me" (1927)
"A Simple Enquiry" (1927)
"Ten Indians" (1927)
"An Alpine Idyll" (1927)
"A Pursuit Race" (1927)
"On the Quai at Smyrna" (1930)
"Fathers and Sons" (1932)
"A Natural History of the Dead" (1932)
"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (1933)
"A Day's Wait" (1933)
"The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" (1933)
"A Way You'll Never Be" (1933)
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936)
"The Capital of the World" (1936)
"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1936)
"Old Man at the Bridge" (1938)

Short story
collections

Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923)
In Our Time (1925)
Men Without Women (1927)
Winner Take Nothing (1933)
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1961)
The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (1969)
The Nick Adams Stories (1972)
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987)
Ernest Hemingway: The Collected Stories (1995)

Story fragments

"On Writing"

Poetry

88 Poems (1979)
Complete Poems

Plays

Today is Friday (1926)
The Fifth Column (1938)

Screenplays

The Spanish Earth (1937 film)

Letters and
journalism

By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (1967)
Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961 (1981)
Dateline: Toronto (1985)
The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway (2011)

Adaptations

The Sun Also Rises	1957 film 1984 film Opera The Select (The Sun Also Rises) Ballet
"The Killers"	1946 film 1956 film 1964 film Bukowski short story
A Farewell to Arms	1932 film 1957 film 1966 TV series
To Have and Have Not	1944 film The Breaking Point (1950) The Gun Runners (1958) Captain Khorshid (1987)
For Whom the Bell Tolls	1943 film 1959 TV play 1965 TV series 1984 song
The Old Man and the Sea	1958 film 1990 film 1999 animated film
Other film adaptations	The Macomber Affair (1947) Under My Skin (1950) The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962) Islands in the Stream (1977) Soldier's Home (1977) My Old Man (1979) After the Storm (2001) The Garden of Eden (2008) Across the River and into the Trees (2022)