One-hundred years on: Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River”

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.

- John Ruskin

The story portrayed a young man’s healing pilgrimage into the wilderness.

I was too young, at ten, to grasp the pilgrimage part. I simply let the lean, deceptively simple sentences pull me along like the current of the river where Nick Adams fished.

Each Friday afternoon, our fifth-grade teacher allowed us to read whatever we wanted for a quiet hour at the end of the day. And so, on this day in late May 1960, with summer vacation beckoning, I tackled a story in my trusty school reader by the famous author with the formidable, fortress-like name who wrote for grown-ups: Ernest Hemingway, who had just over a year to live.

“Big Two-Hearted River: Part I and II,” was most likely written, with interruptions from the author’s busy life in Paris, between May and September 1924, when Hemingway was twenty-five. One hundred years later, young Hemingway’s short story remains as fresh as daybreak.

“The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber,” the story begins. With the second sentence, I relaxed a little: “Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding the baggage man had pitched out of the door of the baggage car.” The repetition of the word “baggage” struck a note with me, somehow signaling this would not be a fancy, over-my-head, tale for grown-ups only. Mother Goose had prepared me for the efficacies of repetition. Of course, I knew nothing about how Gertrude Stein had counseled the young Hemingway about the same.

I read on, yielding to the power of language to incarnate a world.

I knew I was considered an advanced reader for my age. My mother had started me out with the Mother Goose Rhymes. My older brother, by five years, spent time reading to me before I could read for myself: Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, The Brothers Grimm Fairytales. A couple of years later, one Saturday afternoon after catechism, I memorized the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary within an hour. The mysterious, dignified beauty of their tidal rhythms expanded and deepened my uncomplicated world.

I knew nothing of Hemingway’s Roman Catholic leanings. Nor did I know he had written: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not just depict life or criticize it—but to actually make it alive so that when you’re reading something by me you actually experience the thing.”

“Big Two-Hearted River” is the last story in Hemingway’s first full-scale book, In Our Time, published in 1925, a seminal, slender volume of down-to-earth, Anglo-Saxon prose that helped change the way English was, and is, written. The story mentions neither war nor trauma; those who had read the preceding stories from that collection knew Nick had suffered both. Hemingway, of course, was badly wounded in Italy as an eighteen-year-old ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in July 1918 in the War to End All Wars.

Nick Adams, Hemingway’s alter ego, entered the woods of upper Michigan as an American Huck Finn back from a world war. He fished, made camp, cooked over an open fire, slept, and woke up the next morning to make buckwheat flapjacks and to fish again. A simple anatomy of a story that is not so simple.

As I would learn years later, a kind of private liturgy played out in much of Hemingway’s writing, which included not only the what and why of things, but the how — how to bait a hook, how to pitch a tent, how to read a river, how to be alone in the woods. Everything Nick did was just so in a way in which he seemed to be trying to keep some inner tide of fear at bay, a fear that would cause Jake Barnes, hero of The Sun Also Rises, to keep a night light beside his bed.

I was too young to think in these terms, but I could sense Nick’s lack of ease; something was not right with him all the way through.

Here is the famous passage from early in the story, when Nick looked down from a railroad bridge: “The river was there. It swirled against the log piles of the bridge. Nicked looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.”

“A long time” leaves us guessing at Nick’s inner life. Such concentrated gazing, consciously or not, signals a meaningful interiority: a form of adoration.

Struggling at times, I stayed with the story, which had taken on the specificity of a dream. Once, when Nick spoke out loud to himself beside the first-night’s campfire, Nick, and I, felt the momentary, compound-fracture of the spell we were in.

“Nick was hungry. He did not believe he had ever been hungrier. He opened and emptied a can of pork and beans and a can of spaghetti into the frying pan.

‘“I’ve got a right to eat this kind of stuff, if I’m willing to carry it,’ Nick said. His voice sounded strange in the darkening woods. He did not speak again.”

Later, when it was time to sleep, camped beside the swamp he would fish in the morning: “Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire, when the night wind blew on it. It was a quiet night. The swamp was perfectly quiet.”

The next day, at story’s end, fishing the river once again, Nick was at home in the world, but when he faced the swamp, things were different: “He did not want to go in there now…in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic.”

The last sentence in the story prophesizes young Hemingway’s future life: “There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp.”

In his essay “The Catholic Writer Today,” Dana Gioia states: “Catholic writers tend to see humanity struggling in a fallen world. They combine a longing for grace and redemption with a deep sense of human imperfection and sin.”

This fits Hemingway, the writer, to a T. My purpose is not to argue, let alone prove, that Ernest Hemingway was a committed Roman Catholic. Much ink, as the saying goes, has been spilled over the matter of the Hemingway’s relationship to Catholicism.

We know Hemingway said he was baptized in Italy after being wounded; that a Catholic priest, following his conversion, presided at his marriage ceremony with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer; that he was drawn to Europe’s medieval cathedrals, including Chartres, and the beauty of the Catholic liturgy; that Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, was Catholic; that a parish priest in Key West, Florida, where Hemingway lived in the 1930s, reported that the writer never missed Sunday mass (but always stood at the back of the church); that a Catholic priest presided over his graveside service in Ketchum, Idaho in July 1961.

The rest is for the scholars to sort out. As Thomas Merton wrote in “An Elegy for Ernest Hemingway,” “Now/men in monasteries, men of requiems, familiar with/the dead, include you in their offices.”

Hemingway was a very sick man, old beyond his years, when he committed suicide at 61, an act that rocked his fans and his detractors. Few had any idea how sick he really was. Mary Dearborn’s acclaimed Ernest Hemingway: A Biography, published in 2018, chronicled the full, shocking load of destabilizing medicines he was taking for depression, alcoholism, anxiety, and any number of conditions complicit doctors had a prescription for. Not to mention electroshock therapy.

One hundred years after Ernest Hemingway wrote “Big Two-Hearted River,” sixty-three years after I first encountered the story, I still go back every few years to “actually experience the thing” — a kind of Lectio Divina. And I feel afresh the rhythms of a childhood prayer move within Nick Adams’ Post-War pilgrimage into the forest, where the beauties of the natural world contain a dark swamp.