Big Two-Hearted River

Ernest Hemingway, shown in a 1923 passport photo, two years before the publication of "Big Two-Hearted River"

"Big Two-Hearted River" is a two-part short story written by American author Ernest Hemingway. The story was published in the 1925 Boni & Liveright edition of In Our Time, the first American volume of Hemingway's short stories. It features a single protagonist, Hemingway's recurrent autobiographical character Nick Adams, whose speaking voice is heard just twice. Thematically, the story explores the destructive qualities of war, countered by the healing and regenerative powers of nature. When the piece was published, critics praised the quality of writing, and it is considered important in the Hemingway canon.

The story is one of Hemingway's earliest to employ his iceberg theory of writing, a modernist prose style where the underlying meaning of the work is only hinted at, rather than made explicit. "Big Two-Hearted River" is almost exclusively descriptive and almost completely abandons plot or narrative arc. At the time, Hemingway was influenced by Cézanne's paintings in which background details are less focused than those in the foreground—a motif Hemingway adapts in the story. The minutiae of a camping and fishing trip are examined in great depth, while the background elements of the landscape, and most particularly an area of swamp, are given only cursory descriptions.

Background and publication

In 1922, Hemingway moved with his wife Hadley to Paris where he worked as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. He became friends with and influenced by modernist writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. He was first published in 1923, with a slim volume titled Three Stories and Ten Poems, followed the next year by another collection of short vignettes, in our time (without capitals). Hoping to have in our time published in New York, in 1924 he began writing stories to add to the volume, with "Big Two-Hearted River" planned as the final piece. He started writing the story in May of that year but did not finish until September as he spent the summer helping Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford launch the journal the transatlantic review.

Gertrude Stein photographed with Hemingway's son Jack in 1924. Stein advised Hemingway to shorten the ending of "Big Two-Hearted River".

"Big Two-Hearted River" has strong autobiographical elements. Hemingway was a member of the Red Cross at 19, and was sent to the Italian Front at Fossalta as an ambulance driver. On his first day there he helped to retrieve the remains of female workers killed in a munitions factory explosion, about which he later wrote in Death in the Afternoon: "I remember that after we searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments". A few days later, on July 8, he was severely wounded when a mortar exploded between his legs. He was sent to a hospital in Milan where he recuperated for six months; after his return home to Michigan, in the summer of 1919, he took a fishing and camping trip with high school friends. In September he went on a second fishing trip, alone, in Michigan's back-country—a trip that became the inspiration for "Big Two-Hearted River". The manuscript shows the use of plural pronouns, suggesting that in an early version more characters were included, but by publication any mention of his high school friends or the townspeople had been removed—leaving Nick alone in the woods.

When asked her opinion of the draft in October, Stein advised Hemingway to cut an 11-page section of stream-of-consciousness reminiscences written from Nick's point of view. He took her advice, reworked the ending, and wrote to his editor, "I have discovered that the last eleven pages of the last story in the book are crap". Biographer James Mellow writes that at this early stage in his career, Hemingway had not developed his talent enough to fully and capably integrate self-reflections in his writing; Mellow also believes the deleted passage might have been a "tour-de-force" had it been written at a more mature period in Hemingway's development.

In January 1925, while wintering in Schruns, Austria, waiting for a response from America, Hemingway submitted the story to be published in his friend Bill Walsh's newly established literary magazine This Quarter. Walsh bought it for 1,000 French francs, the highest payment Hemingway had yet received for a piece of fiction. On October 5, 1925, the expanded edition of In Our Time (with conventional capitalization in the title) was published by Boni & Liveright in New York. The last story in the volume was the two-part "Big Two-Hearted River". The piece was later included in Hemingway's collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories published in October 1938, and in two collections of short stories published after his death, The Nick Adams Stories (1972) and The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition (1987).

Plot

Part one

Nick was happy as he crawled inside his tent .... It had been a hard trip. He was very tired .... He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp.

—Ernest Hemingway, "Big Two-Hearted River"

The story opens with Nick arriving by train at Seney, Michigan, to find that a fire has devastated the town, leaving "nothing but the rails and the burned-over country." While following a road leading away from the town, he stops on a bridge where he observes trout in the river below. After, he hikes up a hill and rests at a burned stump. While smoking a cigarette, he discovers an ash-blackened grasshopper crawling on his sock, and detaches it. His first spoken words in the story are "Go on hopper...Fly away somewhere."

Later in the day he relaxes in a glade of tall pines and falls asleep. When he wakes, he hikes the last mile to the edge of the river where he sees the trout feeding in the evening light "making circles all down the surface of the water as though it were starting to rain." Carefully he pitches his tent, unpacks his supplies, cooks his dinner, fills his water bucket, heats a pot of coffee, and kills a mosquito before falling asleep.

Part two

Early that morning, Nick fills a jar with 50 dew-heavy grasshoppers found under a log he names a "grasshopper lodging-house", eats breakfast, drinks sweetened coffee and makes a sliced onion sandwich. After checking and assembling his fly-fishing rod and tying on damp leader line, he walks to the river with a net hanging from his belt, a sack over his shoulder and the jar of grasshoppers dangling around his neck. Wading in the water, he fishes the shallows; he lands a trout that "was mottled with clear, water-over-gravel color" that he releases. Moving into a pool of deep water, he hooks a large trout, "as broad as a salmon", which he loses. After a rest, he moves away from the deep water to the center of the river and catches two trout that he stows in his sack. Sitting on a log, smoking a cigarette and eating his onion sandwich, he thinks about fishing the deep water of the swamp, but decides to wait for another day. At the log in the river, he kills, guts and cleans the two trout before returning to camp.

Themes

War

Hemingway saw the great war as the "central fact of our time". The story examines both the physical devastation and Nick's personal post-war experience, however it is not directly mentioned at any point. Flora makes the observation that Hemingway portrays the character coping "more meaningfully than he had ever done before, with the issues of life and death". Biographer Phillip Young sees the piece as a description of a young man "trying desperately to keep from going out of his mind."

Ernest Hemingway in Milan, 1918. The 19 year old author is here photographed recovering from shrapnel wounds.

Nick returns home wounded, and introduces a character type Hemingway used again and again in his later stories and novels. The theme of an unspecified wound is introduced, a device that was to culminate in Jake Barnes' character in The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway scholar William Adair suggests that Nick's war experience was different, and perhaps more traumatic, than Hemingway's own, writing that Nick's unspecified wound should not be confused or automatically identified with Hemingway's wound.

The scholar Jackson Benson believes that autobiographical details are employed as framing devices to make observations on life in general and not just Nick's own experiences. He writes that Hemingway created "what if" scenarios from real situations in his early fiction, which he projected onto a fictional character—"What if I were wounded and made crazy?" the character asks himself. Benson goes on to write that "much of Hemingway's fiction is dream-like—his early fiction, his best, has often compared to a compulsive nightmare, as in the recurring imagery of In Our Time."

Adair views the river in the story as a fictional representation of the Piave River, located near Fossalta and the site of Hemingway's wounding. Hemingway may have taken the idea of the swamp from the terrain in the battle of Portogrande—a battle which Hemingway wrote about in a 1922 newspaper story, saying of it: "Austrians and Italians attacked and counter-attacked waist deep in swamp water". Furthermore, Adair suggests in "Big Two-Hearted River: Why the Swamp is Tragic" that Hemingway's own wounding is reflected in the scene where Nick loses a fish—the "biggest one I ever had"—with descriptive imagery such as shoes "squelchy" with water, suggestive of Hemingway's recollection of "feeling as if his boots were filled with warm water (blood) after his wounding."

Writing in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway reflected on "Big Two-Hearted River" and remembered when he "sat in a corner with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in the notebook .... When I stopped writing I did not want to leave the river where I could see the trout in the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. The story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it."

Nature

Hemingway typically presents nature as a source of refuge and rebirth. His characters frequently retreat to the country for emotional regeneration. It is there that his hunters or fishermen experience an existential moment of transcendence—especially at the moment prey is killed. In the story, Nick leaves behind the burnt town, enters the woods and hikes toward the river, which is constant and unharmed by the fire. Nick goes there to heal himself; the river is called two-hearted because it gives life in the form of food (fish) and offers redemption. In the woods, Nick stops in a grove of trees that is described as chapel-like, a description that echoes Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage in which Henry Fleming flees to a chapel-like grove of trees. In the grove Nick sleeps well for the first time since the war, and there he begins the healing process. The next morning he goes to the river, wading into the water to fish. At first the strength of the current frightens him, and for some moments he has difficulty controlling himself.

The meadow was wet with dew and Nick wanted to catch grasshoppers for bait before the sun dried the grass. He found plenty of good grasshoppers .... They were cold and wet with the dew and could not jump until the sun warmed them. Nick picked them up, taking only the medium sized brown ones, and put them into the bottle.

—Ernest Hemingway, "Big Two-Hearted River"

The descriptions of the Michigan landscape, which would have been familiar to Hemingway who had grown up in the state, are written in a vague and representational manner, according to Benson. Berman believes that here Hemingway treats landscape like a painter's canvas on which he shows Nick's state of mind, and the descriptions of the river's water are reminiscent of American transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau's descriptions of the pond in Walden. Meyers says the story shows a blend of American primitivism and sophistication; Nick shows a sense of loss which is "not simply grace under pressure—but under siege". Nature is perceived as good and civilization as bad—a pervasive theme in American literature, found in such American classics as Mark Twain's 19th-century Huckleberry Finn and in William Faulkner's 20th-century Go Down, Moses.

Hemingway is fundamentally an American nature writer according to Hemingway scholar Susan Beegel. She attributes it to his upbringing: his mother believed avidly in the early 20th-century "back to nature" movement, and his father was a physician who taught science to his son, taking him to Agassiz Movement meetings as a young boy. Hemingway's affinity with nature is reflected most strongly in "Big Two-Hearted River", in broad strokes whereby he has Nick traveling deep into the American back-country to find solace, and in small details such as his Agassiz "object oriented" descriptions of the grasshoppers.

Style

Iceberg theory

Hemingway was inspired by Pound's writings and applied the principals of imagism to his own work. Pound's example is considered highly influential in the formulation of the stripped-down style characteristic of Hemingway's early fiction. Hemingway said that Pound "taught [me] more about how to write and how not to write than any son of a bitch alive". A second influence was Joyce, who instilled in him the idea of pared down work stripped to its bare essentials. The scholar Jackson Benson holds that the short stories written in the 1920s adhere to Pound's definition of imagism, and biographer Carlos Baker writes that in his short stories Hemingway tried to learn how to "get the most from the least, how to prune language, how to multiply intensities, and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth". The technique is called the iceberg theory: as Baker describes it, the hard facts float above water while the supporting structure, including the symbolism, operates out of sight.

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

—Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon

The iceberg theory has been described as the "theory of omission". Hemingway believed a writer could describe one object or concept while writing about something entirely different. In "Big Two-Hearted River" he examines Nick's mundane activities in depth, a device which deliberately masks the emotional turmoil below the surface. The story is filled with seemingly trivial detail: Nick catching grasshoppers, Nick making coffee, as well as the climactic event when he catches and loses a large trout—the excitement and tension of which is so strong that he has to take a break.

While the prose is full of densely compacted discriptions, the story has only the barest plot. Hemingway deliberately employs elaborate surface details to mask the deep inner turmoil of Nick's return home from war. Hemingway said of it, "'Big Two-Hearted River' is about a boy beat to the wide coming home from the war .... beat to the wide was an earlier and possibly more severe form of beat, since those who had been were unable to comment on this condition and could not suffer that it be mentioned in their presence. So the war, all mention of the war, anything about the war is omitted." Hemingway scholar Joseph Flora believes that in "Big Two-Hearted River" the concept of the iceberg theory is more evident than in any other piece written by Hemingway.

According to Paul Smith, Hemingway was still experimenting stylistically by In Our Time. Smith believes the minimalist style of the piece came about not so much from tight editing as that Hemingway's sentences "began life as scrawny little things, and then grew to their proper size through a process of accretion." He avoided complicated syntax to reflect Nick's wish that the fishing trip be uncomplicated. An analysis of the text shows that about 70 percent of the sentences are simple sentences—a childlike syntax without subordination—and that repetition is often substituted for subordinate thoughts. Furthermore, the repetition creates prose with a "rhythmic, ritualistic effect" that emphasizes important points. The length of the paragraphs varies with short paragraphs intensifying the action. Benson writes that in "Indian Camp" and "Big Two-Hearted River" Hemingway's prose was sharper and more abstract than in other stories, and that by employing simple sentences and diction—techniques he learned writing for newspapers—the prose is timeless with an almost mythic quality.

Cézanne

Hemingway said of Paul Cézanne's In the Forest of Fontainebleau that "This is what we try to do in writing, this and this, and woods and the rocks we have to climb over".

Hemingway developed a keen interest in the work of Post-Impressionist Cézanne's paintings. He admitted in a 1949 interview that "Cézanne is my painter after the early painters .... I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cézanne, I learned how ... by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times." Hemingway wanted the structure of "Big Two-Hearted River" to resembele a Cézanne—with a detailed foreground set against a vaguely described background. In a letter to Stein from August 1924, he wrote, "I have finished two long stories .... and finished the long one I worked on before I went to Spain where I am doing the country like Cézanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit. It is about 100 pages long and nothing happens and the country is swell. I made it all up".

His approach in decribing the river and the countryside betray the influence of the paintely post-impressionism style. At the time Hemingway was heavily influenced by the modernists. He often visited the Musée du Luxembourg, where he saw the three Cézanne paintings L'Estaque, Cour d'une ferme and Les Peupliers. That spring, before he began the story, a series of Cézanne watercolors were exhibited at Berheim-Jeune Gallery, about which Hemingway would write many years later in A Moveable Feast that he had been "learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them."

L'Estaque, Melting Snow, Cézanne, c. 1871

When comparing "Big Two-Hearted River" to Cézanne's paintings, Ronald Berman observed that that Hemingway early on establishes a "representation of form, space and light", and that the dense descriptive passages give "light and form .... overwhelmingly visual, intensely concerned with spatiality", while in the middle ground, "We sense [the trees] through vertical forms and dark colors only". Like a Cézanne painting, the landscape, as described by Hemingway, is representational: Seney burned in 1891, not in 1919; the hill Nick climbs does not exist; and the east branch of the Fox River, where he camps, is not a day's hike from the town.

Kenneth Johnston believes Hemingway's use of symbolism is in a way a substitute for paint and brushstrokes. He views the description of the town after the fire, and the railroad tracks, as words "slash[ed] across the landscape", whith a physicality similar to a Cézanne landscape. The minutely detailed passages on the campsite and Nick's mundane activities fill the story's foreground, while the forest and menacing swamp, relegated to the background, are described vaguely and only in passing. The river acts as a barrier between the foreground and background, and is present as deep in places, shallow in others, with currents that are either slow or fast. Berman says Nick is shown as a figure in a painting—seen in the foreground at the campsite and at a distance from the murky background of the swamp.

Symbolism

Nick is incapable of self-reflection and unable to cope with pain. Hemingway conveys this through symbolism and a series of objective correlatives (tangible objects), which allow the reader insight to the character's motivations. For example, when he arrives in Seney he literally falls down, shocked at the sight of the burned town, but on a deeper level he is in shock from his war experience. Leaving behind the burnt landscape, in the heat, Nick climbs a hill to survey the damage. The burning and heat symbolize his memory of war-torn Italy, but he hopes for regrowth; "It could not all be burned. He knew that".'

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 ... Nick did not want it.

—Ernest Hemingway, "Big Two-Hearted River"

Beyond the town the bridge over the river still exists and the river symbolizes time and timelessness, healing and the natural cycle of life and death. Nick is on a quest, perhaps a religious quest given the Christian symbolism of the fish, which he watches from the bridge for a long time. After climbing a hill, he takes a break in the mid-day heat, smokes a cigarette, and speaks for the first time. Flora suggests that speaking symbolizes his humanity, lost in the war, which he is beginning to regain.

From the town, a road leads into pristine back-country. It crosses a bridge under which the trout hold steady against the current, just as Nick wants to hold steady. From the bridge he glimpses a kingfisher taking wing, a bird that in mythology symbolizes "halcyon days, peace and tranquility". Johnston says that a large uprooted tree symbolizes the protagonist himself uprooted by war, and that his fragility is symbolized by the trout he releases carefully so as not to damage its protective slime coat. The campsite, set deep in a pine grove and described in soothing greens, symbolizes safety, while in the background beyond three logs looms the swamp where he will not venture.

His tent is portrayed as a less dark place than the emptiness outside, and becomes a place of safety and sanctuary. Conversely, the swamp is described in themes that convey it as shrouded in mist at night, and a place Nick deliberately tries not to think about. When he wakes in the morning, regenerated by sleep, he feels stronger and the swamp seems less threatening.

Reception

In our time was published as part of Pound's modernist series by Three Mountains Press, Paris in 1924. The work was well received by critics; Edmund Wilson described the writing as "of the first distinction", and in the 1940s he again wrote of "Big Two-Hearted River", "along with the mottled trout ... the boy from the American Middle West fishes up a nice little masterpiece." When the story was published in the United States, critics asserted Hemingway had reinvigorated the short story by his use of declarative sentences and his crisp style. In 1952, reviewing The Old Man and the Sea—for which Hemingway would win the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature—The New York Times said of "Big Two-Hearted River" that it was one of the "best and happiest of his early short stories".

In the 1970s, Carlos Baker wrote that the stories of In Our Time were a remarkable achievement for a young writer, and in 2004, Joseph Flora said of the story that "it is unquestionably the most brilliant of the collection In Our Time". It has become one of Hemingway's most anthologized stories, and is one of a handful that has been a subject of literary criticism since its publication. It has become part of the 20th-century American literary canon, writes Beegel, and is considered "among the best" American short stories along with Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat", Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher".

According to Benson, although Hemingway was influenced by Pound and Joyce, he "carried the new form into the position of dominant influence" for much of the 20th century. Unlike other modernist writers, who wrote of man cut off from the past, Hemingway placed his narratives in the present and hence he became "the true modernist".

References

Sources

• Adair, William (1991). "Big Two-Hearted River": Why the Swamp is Tragic". Journal of Modern Literature. 17.1, 584–588
• Baker, Carlos (1972). Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton: Princeton UP. ISBN 978-0-691-01305-3
• Baker, Carlos (1981). Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917–1961. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 978-0-684-16765-7
• Beegel, Susan (2000). "Eye and Heart: Hemingway's Education as a Naturalist". in Wagner-Martin, Linda (ed). A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway. New York: Oxford UP. ISBN 978-0-19-512152-0
• Beegel, Susan (1992). "Introduction". in Beegel, Susan F. (ed). Hemingway's Neglected Short Fiction. Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP. ISBN 978-0-8173-0586-4
• Benson, Jackson (1975). "Ernest Hemingway as Short Story Writer". in Benson, Jackson (ed). The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays. Durham NC: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-0320-6
• Benson, Jackson (1989). "Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life". American Literature. 61.3, 354–358
• Berman, Ronald (2007). "Hemingway's Michigan Landscapes". The Hemingway Review. 27.1, 39–54
• Berman, Ronald (2011). Translating Modernism: Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP. ISBN 978-0-8173-5665-1
• Flora, Joseph (2004) "Soldier Home: Big Two-Hearted River". in Bloom's Major Literary Characters: Nick Adams. New York: Chelsea House Press. ISBN 978-0-7910-7885-3
• Hemingway, Ernest (1973 edition). "Big-Two Hearted River". in The Nick Adams Stories, Philip Young (ed). New York: Bantam
• Johnston, Kenneth (1984). "Hemingway and Cézanne: Doing the Country". American Literature. 56.1, 28–37
• Mellow, James (1992). Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-395-37777-2
• Meyers, Jeffrey (1985). Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-42126-0
• Oliver, Charles (1999). Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work. New York: Checkmark Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8160-3467-3
• Smith, Paul (1996). "1924: Hemingway's Luggage and the Miraculous Year". in Donaldson, Scott (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway. New York: Cambridge UP. ISBN 978-0-521-45574-9
• Stoltzfus, Ben (2005). "Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories". Comparative Literature Studies. 42.3, 228–250
• Reynolds, Michael (1989). Hemingway: The Paris Years. New York: Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-31879-1
• Wagner-Martin, Linda (2002). "Introduction". in Wagner-Martin, Linda (ed). Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises: A Casebook. New York: Oxford UP. ISBN 978-0-19-514573-1
• Wells, Elizabeth J. (1975). "A Statistical Analysis of the Prose Style of Ernest Hemingway: Big Two-Hearted River". in Benson, Jackson (ed). The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays. Durham NC: Duke UP. ISBN 978-0-8223-0320-6
• Wilson, Edmund (2005 edition). "Hemingway: Gauge of Morale". in Bloom, Harold (ed). Ernest Hemingway: Bloom's Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. ISBN 978-0-7910-8135-8
• Young, Philip (1973). Ernest Hemingway. St. Paul: Minnesota UP. ISBN 978-0-8166-0191-2
• Zapf, Hubert (2005). "Reflection vs. Daydream: Two Types of Implied Reader in Hemingway's Fiction". in Bloom, Harold (ed). Ernest Hemingway: Bloom's Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. ISBN 978-0-7910-8135-8

External links

• Hemingway Archives, John F. Kennedy Library
• "The Art of Fiction No. 21. The Paris Review. Spring 1958.