Revisiting Hemingway’s pre-novel musings

Before Ernest Hemingway became a celebrated novelist, he wrote short stories, many of which had roots Up North in Michigan. Perhaps his most famous story is “Big Two-Hearted River,” wherein he recounts a fishing trip taken by Nick Adams, his youthful protagonist. Hemingway is said to have taken a similar trip with friends in 1919.

To honor this classic short story, author John N. Maclean and illustrator Chris Wormell have teamed up to issue a centennial edition.

Like Hemingway, Maclean was raised with a passion for fishing and worked as a journalist for more than three decades in Chicago. He wrote a memoir, “Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River,” about his family’s connection to the Blackfoot River in Montana, where he grew up and still owns a cabin. His father, Norman Maclean, wrote a semi-autobiographical story about his time spent along the Blackfoot, “A River Runs Through It,” and like “Big Two-Hearted River” it’s about more than fly fishing. It’s about life.

Maclean’s foreword delves into the deeper meaning of Adams’ trip, Hemingway’s lean writing and what Maclean calls Hemingway’s “troubled state of mind,” which Hemingway lays out in complex metaphors that have been explored by scholars for a century.

Is Hemingway’s description of the fire-scorched Seney area in the Upper Peninsula a reflection on his time as an ambulance driver in World War I, which left him scarred both physically and emotionally? In his foreword, Maclean examines the numerous drafts of the short story and details how it changed prior to its first publication in the Paris literary journal This Quarter in 1925, one year before the publication of Hemingway’s debut novel, “The Sun Also Rises.”

It was within “Big Two-Hearted River” that Hemingway refined his style of short sentences, repetition and use of few words to illustrate what can only be called a photographic memory.

To clarify, Hemingway wrote fiction. He never fished the Big Two-Hearted River, but he thought the title was more poetic than “Fox River,” which he actually fished during his 1919 trip to Seney.

As the power of Hemingway’s words grew with his publication of “A Farewell to Arms,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and later “The Old Man and the Sea,” his short stories were largely forgotten until “The Nick Adams Stories” was published in 1972, a decade after his death. 

Maclean, like scores of Hemingway scholars, has probed “Big Two-Hearted River” for its bigger meaning about life. Even Hemingway, in his memoir “A Moveable Feast,” said it was about war, but a poem he wrote for his first literary publication, “Three Stories and Ten Poems,” helps clarify his state of mind. 

The poem, titled “Along with Youth,” seems to be a languid goodbye to youth and the time Hemingway spent in Michigan, where he would return only once more for business.

“A porcupine skin,
Stiff with bad tanning,
It must have ended somewhere.
Stuffed horned owl
Pompous
Yellow eyed;

Maclean’s foreword and Wormell’s dramatic art underline that loss of innocence that Hemingway further explores in “Big Two-Hearted River” and add to the never-ending drama of exploring the author’s body of work.

In 2007, I had the once-in-a-lifetime experience of working on the Michigan Humanities Council’s first Great Michigan Read program, which had selected “The Nick Adams Stories.” To prepare for writing the study guide with my good friend Greg Parker, I felt compelled to read all of Hemingway’s body of work. I had read much of his work in high school and college, but reading it as an adult was an experience I would highly recommend.

Parker and I were inspired to write a children’s book based on one of Hemingway’s trips to Michigan. It was ahead of its time in the children’s book industry, and we moved on, but maybe someday we’ll pick it back up. It was fun, and we got to write lean prose like “the water was clear and cold.”