"Then We Were Three" is told from a third-person limited omniscient point-of-view, in which the 22-year-old Minnie Brooks is the focal character.
Three well-to-do American expatriates form a platonic threesome while traveling together in Europe. The boys, Munnie and Bert, are friends from college. Bert is a glib extrovertThey discover the girl, Martha, while visiting the Uffizi art gallery in Florence and she joins them. At the outset the trio agree to suppress any romantic complications that would spoil their comity. They travel from resort to resort in Munnie’s sports car, playing roulette and winning enough to sustain themselves. Bert is a world-wise and cynical extrovert; Munnie appreciates Bert’s glib rhetoric, and passively tolerates his older friend to jocular mockery. Bert acknowledges but disparages Munnie’s moral superiority.
Munnie admits to himself that he is falling in love with the petite, pretty and self-assured Martha. Disaffected from her family, she is content to be a social drifter. Munnie indulges in forlorn fantasies that she might marry him. He suppresses his feelings of jealousy as he perceives that Bert and Martha become increasingly flirtatious with one another.
Sharing a picnic on a beach, the three witness a boating accident. A couple’s small vessel capsizes and the man cries for help. As the man attempts to swim ashore, he appears in danger of drowning. Bert and Martha are content to merely report the matter to the police. Munnie feels compelled to act: he strips naked and plunges into the water. By the time he nears the man, Munnie is dangerously fatigued. Suddenly a fishing boat appears and picks up the near-drowning man and the women clinging to the boat. Munnie, too modest to climb aboard in the nude, declines to be rescued, and barely makes it back to shore. Bert sardonically chastens Munnie for his heroics and Martha giggles as he dresses himself.
At the hotel Munnie collapses in bed. Bert and Martha go to the casino. Late that night he awakens to hear the two enter Martha’s upstairs apartment. Munnie rises from bed and collects his things. He writes a short note to Bert informing him that he is returning to the United States; he makes no reference to Martha. Driving away in his car in the rain, he chides himself for not ending his summer sojourn a day earlier.[4][5]
Background
The story is based on an amusing incident involving the then editor of The Paris Review, George Plimpton, writer John P. Marquand and Sue Coward, who would later marry Marquand.[6] The minor disaster occurred when the three were traveling in Europe. While on a pier, the trio witnessed a small boat capsizing near shore. The French couple operating the boat called for help. Marquand heroically attempted to swim to them, but all three required rescuing by a nearby fishing boat.[2]
The story was related to Shaw while the three[clarification needed] were at a Saint-Jean-de-Luz restaurant in 1953. Biographer Michael Shnayerson reports that Shaw, impressed by the rendering of the incident, retreated to the restroom to furtively record notes from which he would develop the story.[2]
"Then We Were Three" was declined by The New Yorker, a journal that had formerly published numerous short stories by Shaw. Shnayerson remarks that "in tone and style it was a story of unmistakable New Yorker dimensions", yet it was rejected.[7]McCall's accepted the piece for publication in its August 1955 edition.[2]
Theme
James R. Giles places the story among Shaw’s “best expatriate fiction” in which American “innocence” is contrasted with “sophisticated” Europe, similar to the thematic concerns of Henry James.[8] Giles interprets Munnie’s nakedness and the understanding that Bert and Martha have betrayed him as an Adam figure:
He has, in all innocence, tasted of the Tree of Knowledge. One would have to search through a great deal of fiction to find a familiar pattern of symbolism more effectively understated….The story is beautifully told, supported by underlying Garden of Eden imagery, which is both thematically crucial and consistently understated.”[9]
As an “initiation story” Munnie suffers the perfidy of the cynical Bert and Martha’s passive rejection. The once ardent swain, disabused of his innocence, discovers that only he has exhibited fidelity within the menage-a-trois.[10] Giles writes:
Idealistic, responsible Munnie is forced by his companions into an awareness of the world’s carelessness and selfishness. While he is still fighting against the implications of what he has learned, the summer and his youth have indeed come to an end…but his failure is through strength, not weakness.”[11]
Stripped of his delusions, Munnie—in contrast to his companions—emerges fully “as a decent, caring individual.”[10]
Irwin Shaw was an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and short-story author whose written works have sold more than 14 million copies. He is best known for two of his novels: The Young Lions (1948), about the fate of three soldiers during World War II, which was made into a film of the same name starring Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, and Rich Man, Poor Man (1970), about the fate of two brothers and a sister in the post-World War II decades, which in 1976 was made into a popular miniseries starring Peter Strauss, Nick Nolte, and Susan Blakely.
Lucy Crown is a novel by American author Irwin Shaw. First published in 1956 by Random House, it was Shaw's third novel, following The Young Lions and The Troubled Air.
"Personal Notes of an Infantryman" is an uncollected work of short fiction by J. D. Salinger which appeared in the December 12, 1942 issue of Collier's.
"The Enormous Radio" is a short story by American author John Cheever. It first appeared in the May 17, 1947, issue of The New Yorker, and was subsequently collected in The Enormous Radio and Other Stories., 55 Short Stories from the New Yorker, and The Stories of John Cheever.
"The Hartleys" is a work of short fiction by John Cheever, first published in The New Yorker on January 22, 1949. The story was included in The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953), and in The Stories of John Cheever (1978).
The Enormous Radio and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction by John Cheever published in 1953 by Funk and Wagnalls. All fourteen stories were first published individually in The New Yorker. These works are included in The Stories of John Cheever (1978) published by Alfred A. Knopf.
The Way Some People Live is a collection of 30 works of short fiction by John Cheever, published in 1943 by Random House.
The Brigadier and the Golf Widow is a collection of short fiction by John Cheever, published by Harper and Row in 1964. These sixteen works were first published individually in The New Yorker. The works also appears in The Stories of John Cheever (1978).
"Goodbye, My Brother" is a short story by John Cheever, first published in The New Yorker, and collected in The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953). The work also appears in The Stories of John Cheever (1978).
Some People, Places and Things That Will Not Appear In My Next Novel is a collection of short fiction by John Cheever, published by Harper and Bros. in 1961. These nine short stories first appeared individually in The New Yorker or Esquire magazines. These works are included in the collection The Stories of John Cheever (1978), published by Alfred A. Knopf.
The World of Apples is the sixth collection of short fiction by author John Cheever, published in 1973 by Alfred A. Knopf. The ten stories originally appeared individually in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post or Playboy.
Sailor Off the Bremen and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction by Irwin Shaw published in 1939 by Random House. The volume includes one of Shaw's most critically acclaimed short stories, "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses."
Act of Faith and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction by Irwin Shaw, published by Random House in 1946.
Tip on a Dead Jockey and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction by Irwin Shaw published by Random House in 1957.
"The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" is a work of short fiction by Irwin Shaw, originally published in The New Yorker in 1939 and first collected in Sailor off the Bremen and Other Stories (1939) by Random House.
Welcome to the City and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction by Irwin Shaw published by Random House in 1942.
"The Eighty-Yard Run" is a work of short fiction by Irwin Shaw, originally published in Esquire and first collected in Welcome to the City and Other Stories (1942) by Random House.
"Main Currents of American Thought" is a work of short fiction by Irwin Shaw, originally appearing in The New Yorker in 1939 and first collected in Welcome to the City and Other Stories (1942) by Random House.
"Walking Wounded” is a work of short fiction by Irwin Shaw, originally appearing in The New Yorker on May 13, 1944, and first collected in Act of Faith and Other Stories (1946) by Random House. The story was carried by Stars and Stripes during the war.
"Tip on a Dead Jockey” is a work of short fiction by Irwin Shaw, originally appearing in The New Yorker on March 6, 1954, and first collected in Tip on a Dead Jockey and Other Stories (1957) by Random House.
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