![]() “Big Two-Hearted River” is not simply a luminous fishing tale it’s also an unsolved mystery. But we stumbled over the meanings of the dark metaphors that begin and end the story. We were both deeply pleased that fishing and literature could be successfully combined, and in future decades we would strive to do the same thing as writers. Taken in context with his other work, it marks Hemingway’s passage from boyish writer to accomplished author: nothing big came before it, novels and stories poured out after it.Īfter my dad gave me the story to read in the 1950s, we sat down together to analyze it. More than any of his stories, it depends on his “iceberg theory” of literature, the notion that leaving essential parts of a story unsaid adds to its power. Scott Fitzgerald hailed it as a masterpiece, albeit a short one. Despite complaints that “nothing happens” in the narrative, perceptive readers such as Edmund Wilson and F. The redone story first appeared in May 1925 in This Quarter, a Paris literary journal, and then in October as the anchor story for In Our Time. It was a lucky catch: critics would not have been kind. He ditched the almost ten-page section and had a new ending in the hands of his publisher before the presses rolled. “I got a hell of a shock when I realized how bad it was,” he wrote one correspondent. ![]() He showed the manuscript to Stein, who said of the discourse on writing, “Hemingway, remarks are not literature.” Jolted back to his old self, he reread the section at issue and called it “crap” and worse in letters to her and others. “He was pretty sure he would be.” By the fall of 1924, Hemingway had completed a manuscript, titled it “Big Two-Hearted River,” and sent it off to a publisher for inclusion in his first real book, In Our Time. In the new draft, Hemingway veered from the solo fishing trip in the UP into a long, rambling discourse on writing, writers, bullfighting in Pamplona-and vaulting personal ambition: “He wanted to become a great writer,” he wrote. When he got back to it in late summer or early fall, he’d lost the flow. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Man Ray, as well as older artists like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, who became his surrogate parents.Ī century on, “Big Two-Hearted River” has helped shape language and literature in America and around the world. It was a heady time for the young, unproven writer, who had joined writers and artists of what came to be called the Lost Generation, along with the likes of F. ![]() Hemingway, too, was young and living in contrasting worlds when he wrote “Big Two-Hearted River.” He was just twenty-five when he sat down in a Paris café to work on a story based on a fishing trip a few years earlier to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula-the UP-with two friends, Jack Pentecost and Al Walker. Best of all for me, it bridged the gap between my two worlds and brought trout fishing to life through literature. The story virtually put the rod in your hand to fight a big fish. You tasted the humidity in the air above the river, a second stream thick with insect life and a sweet musk smell from the enclosing brush. It put you hip-deep in a river with Nick Adams, Hemingway’s literary twin, a cold current throbbing against your thighs. Hemingway’s tale evoked the core activity of our life in Montana: trout fishing. My parents hailed from Montana, where we spent our summers, and they both worked at the University of Chicago, my father as a professor of English and my mother as an administrator for the university’s medical center. When I was a youngster struggling to reconcile a life split between a great community of learning in the Midwest and a log cabin in Montana, my father gave me Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” to read. ![]()
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