He went once with his father, the doctor, when he performed a Cesarean operation on an Indian squaw with a jackknife and no anesthetic and sewed her up with fishing leaders, while the Indian wasn't able to bear it and cut his throat in his bunk. Another time, when the doctor saved the life of a squaw, her Indian picked a quarrel with him rather than pay him in work. And Nick himself sent his girl about her business when he found out how terrible her mother was. Not that life isn't enjoyable. But the brutality of life is always there, and it is somehow bound up with the enjoyment.
Bullfights are especially enjoyable.
It is even exhilarating to build a simply priceless barricade and pot the enemy as they are trying to get over it. The resolution of this discord in art made the beauty of Hemingway's stories. He had in the process tuned a marvelous prose. Out of the colloquial American speech, with its simple declarative sentences and its strings of Nordic monosyllables, he got effects of the utmost subtlety. They live and shine, each in its place.