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Article Excerpt
One of Hemingway's early short stories, In Our Time's "The End of Something," demonstrates his acute spatial awareness in the form of cultural geography. The abandoned mill and the second-growth timber in the fictional landscape of "The End of Something" are more than a backdrop. Instead, the presentation of geography in "The End of Something" serves as a form of cultural history and preservation, demonstrating the careful interweaving of human characters with their communities and their landscapes, creating
an evocative portrayal of how the Michigan logging industry influenced the history and emotion of an American geography.
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I VISITED ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S HOUSE outside Ketchum, Idahoin the fall of 2004. The late September weather was golden, crisp, perfect--the skies an intense western blue, long ribbons of quaking aspen and cottonwood trees lining the graceful curves of the Big Wood River. On that late afternoon visit, I watched as a herd of elk grazed quietly in a meadow below Hemmingway's yard, next to the river, and to the north the Boulder/White Cloud mountains glowed brown and violet in the sun. The house itself, now under the care of the Nature Conservancy, has undergone few changes, and so when I peeked through the kitchen window I knew that the faded, worn curtains I could see were probably chosen by Mary, Hemingway's fourth wife, and that the kitchen table was one at which he had often sat. There is a picture, in Kenneth Lynn's massive biography, of Hemingway in the Ketchum house in the winter of 1959, eating dinner with his cat at the kitchen counter; I glimpsed that same counter through the window. And there was the large green door on the south side of the house that marks the entrance to the foyer, where Hemingway used his double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun to take his own life on 2 July 1961.
It struck me that afternoon that every detail of the place, although Hemingway and his wife had long been absent, sang with the history of his life. To the outside observer the house might appear as an increasingly-shabby structure on a spectacular piece of property--the slightly sagging deck with its chipped green paint, the forlorn white bench sitting outside the basement door, and the splintered, peeling wood on the windowsills make an odd juxtaposition with the stunningly beautiful landscape (and the land itself is surrounded by houses that are, needless to say, more reflective of Ketchum, Idaho property values). But to anyone familiar with Hemingway's life story, each tiny detail on the property carries enormous weight and significance. I found myself taking a ridiculous number of pictures of any image I could catch--a worn patch of grass, a refrigerator visible through a window, a cloud shadow on the Boulder Mountains--bringing these images like prizes back to my baffled yet amused American Literature students, who had just begun reading In Our Time.
Geography and place lie at the heart of Hemingway's art, as they did in his life: perhaps this fact explains the powerful urge Hemingway scholars and fans have to see the places where he situated and composed that art. Critical discussion of Hemingway's sense of place is no new enterprise, and what we may call "place-centered" criticism of his work continues to be an active field of discussion. As an author Hemingway presents again and again his disciplined and exacting aesthetic for landscapes (inspired by landscape painters like Cezanne); Susan Beegel reads Hemingway's Nick Adams stories and their "ecological comprehension", of the surrounding landscapes (102), and Terry Tempest Williams calls Hemingway "a powerful mentor, in terms of what it means to create a landscape impressionistically on the page, to make it come alive, pulse, breathe" (11).
As these authors point out, many of Hemingway's geographies do more for his narratives than simply elevate or give depth to the stories; these landscapes are also invested with both aesthetic and cultural meaning. Perhaps one passage that best demonstrates this awareness of the cultural geographies of places comes in the middle of Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa, where he describes the train of thoughts that come to him while fishing in the Gulf Stream:
... when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone.... (149)
While the sentiments expressed in the passage might be called a kind of homage to the permanence of nature, or a sort of deep-ecological awareness of the timelessness of the natural world, also striking is Hemingway's interweaving of geography with cycles of both human and natural change. Place here is created from, influenced, and shaped by both natural (the flowing stream, the ancient shoreline) and human (politics, poverty, martyrdom, cruelty) forces. This kind of awareness of place is a cornerstone of cultural geography.
To impart the natural, historical, and cultural meanings of his settings, Hemingway investigates and presents these places on multiple planes, often documenting the changes that have played out there on human and natural levels; his sensitivity to topography and to the nuances of geography and landscape show him, then, to be a cultural geographer in the contemporary sense of the term. Hemingway himself once remarked that when it comes to art in general, "'[u]nless you...
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