"There Were Plenty of Days Coming When He Could Fish the Swamp."

I had my heart broken today.

I mean, really broken. For the first time today I read Ernest Hemingway. And you know when you read someone and it just lands with you. Like without going to class and without doing a bunch of secondary reading on the author, what they meant, how they died and all that, it just lands like a fucking rock somewhere on your diaphragm. That's what happened when I read Big Two-Hearted River. And I didn't really know why at first. The story follows Nick Adams through Michigan while he fishes and eats and camps in the woods. There is not much interiority to the story which is why the emotional depth that lives within the text caught me so off guard, I think. The prose is short, and at times, choppy which made for quite a different reading experience in comparison to those I've had with other Modernists. Namely Joyce, who I tried to write about on here so many times to no avail. I found no way to put words to what I had read with Joyce. He has a quote about that, I can't find it now, but it's something to the effect of Joyce being for the highfalutin people, while Hemingway is for the layman. My professor and I got a laugh out of that, but to an extent... yes. I think there's a reason that I feel like I can write about Hemingway and it's not because he's simple. It's just because he's so good.

“Hemingway looks at this cat Cristobal on a table in Finca Vigia,” Year Unknown. Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

Joyce and Hemingway were friends. They were neighbors for a while when they both lived in Paris and often times went out drinking together. After being the only person in our class today to say that I actually really liked what we read, my professor said, "hey you're the one that I talked to about Joyce right?" and he gave me a few quotes to read out in the second half of class. They made me fucking laugh, not because they were particularly funny. I mean, to some degree yes they're humorous. But they were so incredible and I feel like it's not very often you hear of two very notable and very influential authors having a friendship like theirs, just two dudes getting into bar brawls and traipsing (Did Hemingway traipse? Maybe not. But Joyce did for sure) around Paris together. Hemingway walked a lot, I know that just from the little reading that I've done since class. Hemingway wrote to A.E. Hotchner that, "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."

Hemingway's 1961 obituary paid respect to their friendship, sharing that in letters or in interviews Hemingway had be noted as saying that, "We would go out to drink and Joyce would fall into a fight. He couldn't even see the man so he'd say: 'Deal with him, Hemingway! Deal with him!' Once in one of those casual conversations you have when you're drinking, Joyce said to me that he was afraid that his writing was too suburban and that maybe he should get a round a bit and see the world. Nora Joyce said, 'Ah Jim could do with a spot of that lion hunting.' Joyce replied, 'The thing we must face is that I couldn't see the lion.' His wife was not to be silenced: 'Hemingway'd describe him to you and afterwards you could go up and smell him. That's all you'd need.'"

That was one that I read out in class today and it was one that made me laugh. Maybe, in a sense I could see where the suburban anxiety was coming in. If you look at the scope of his writing geographically, yes. It's Ireland, mostly Dublin. However, internally Joyce's creation was anything but suburban. And I'm also not entirely sure that Joyce's fear wasn't some sort of put-up job feigning modesty. Hemingway is also quoted saying that Joyce didn't like to talk about his work with other writers and that "he only explained what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it." To know what Ulysses was by reading it. Incredible. Maybe he really did have that fear, I don't know. But I do know that Joyce's take on Modernism, creating a new form and vocabulary to make sense of human thought, was revolutionary. He, along with other writers such as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway did something so truly amazing, not only for Literature, but for my own small little human brain. They created grammars of interiority so full of life, so complex and eternal, that are such a gift.

There are many critiques of Hemingway. Personal life aside, many feel that Hemingway is simple, hyper-masculine, misogynistic, and repetitive. I'm not here to say after reading one short story that none of those things can be true. I just want to say that the short and "boring" prose brought me to tears as I read a sentence as "simple" as, "He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough." Joyce, in an interview, once said: "We were with him [Hemingway] just before he went to Africa. He promised us a living lion. Fortunately we escaped that. But we would like to have the book he as written. He's a good writer, Hemingway. He writes, as he is. We like him. He's a big, powerful peasant, as strong as a buffalo. A sportsman. And ready to live the life he writes about. He would never have written it if his body had not allowed him to live it. But giants of his sort are truly modest; there is much more behind Hemingway's form than people know."

There is something so moving to me in the fact that not only did Joyce understand and support what Hemingway did in his prose, but the delivery of those lines in the interview were not written in a Joycean style. He delivered them in Hemingway's style: short, choppy, often times incomplete. That seems like the biggest nod and gesture of love that I've discovered in a while. Compare that to the letters Joyce wrote to his wife, and the homosocial lowlights in Ulysses and in Hemingway's corpus start to seem a little less low. It's romance. Platonic, sure... maybe. But to say those things about a man like Hemingway, he's "strong as a buffalo," in the style that comes from Hemingway's heart about made me cry when I read it out in class today.

My professor said that critics have called Hemingway's form "prose of emotional autism." It probably sounds bad out of context, but it is so beautiful and it's something you feel when you read him. Like I said earlier, his work lands but it's in such an out of left field, sneaks-up-on-you kind of way that you're like he's not saying anything but I'm feeling it. And he does say stuff. I think that, from the little I know, the autism metaphor probably comes from the disregulation and trauma that he experienced after the war. Everything is about how to function in the world now, when time is still measured by the soldier's minute. YK said it beautifully today; he writes in the form of survival. (I love her.) He is of two minds about survival, reflected in his description of fishing in a swamp and his go around with a mosquito, but most obviously reflected in his title: The Big Two-Hearted River. The rock in my stomach grows 10 stone when I think about how he eventually lost his battle with survival.

I've attached my annotated copy of the first part of his story. If you want, read it, feel it, think about it.

Hemingway - 1987 - The complete short stories of Ernest Hemingway.pdf

Download PDF • 5.35MB

"He wished he had brought something to read. He felt like reading. He did not feel like going on into the swamp. He looked down the river. A big cedar slanted all the way across the stream. Beyond that the river went into the swamp.

Nick did not want to go in there now. He felt a reaction against deep wading with the water deepening up under his armpits, to hook big trout in places impossible to land them. In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it. He did not want to go down the stream any further today...

Nick stood up on the log, holding his rod, the landing net hanging heavy, then stepped into the water and splashed ashore. He climbed the bank and cut up into the woods, toward the high ground. He was going back to camp. He looked back. The river just showed through the trees. There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp." (Hemingway, Big Two-Hearted River)