“Big Two-Hearted River” (pts. I-II, 1925)

Ernest Hemingway had a poet’s touch as well as a poet’s vanity in putting together the In Our Time collection. Many of its stories are very good—this finale to the collection is one of his best, most famous, and most defining. But it is presented as two stories in the Finca Vigia edition, which seems to be scrupulous to Hemingway’s intentions. The “two parts”—is it something about the two hearts?—are interrupted by a prose poem message from our sponsor (also before and after, also between every story in the collection). In this case it is a scene of five men being hanged and thankfully not about bullfighting. Perhaps readers in their time understood the context better than me. Is it a war scene? The writing is concrete and chiseled but what is it doing there? Last time through I tried “Big Two-Hearted River” another way, skipping the in-betweens and just reading it as a single story, where it made much more sense and isn’t that long. Hang some Roman numerals on the two parts and leave it at that, I say. None of this unbecoming monumentality. Not least because “Big Two-Hearted River” is quite a beautiful story and doesn’t need the puffery. I kept thinking of Richard Brautigan and Trout Fishing in America and all the permutations of trout fishing in America because this one (two-part) story has to be the single source of all of them. This is where trout fishing in America becomes iconic. Not, perhaps, that Brautigan necessarily belongs in a discussion of Hemingway, but he certainly spent some time living in this story. In Part I, our old friend Nick Adams is in the wilds of Michigan, returned from travels and war and painful experience, embracing the restorative forest, secure in his meditative outdoors skills. He sets up camp near the river, starts a fire, prepares a meal, makes coffee, remembers a friend, and eventually sleeps. The sense of comfort he finds in these rituals is palpable. In Part II, it’s a day of fishing, with fast water, logs, grasshoppers as bait, water thigh-high in places. A big one gets away but he ends up catching two and knows there will be good fishing for days if he wants. A city slicker such as myself may be slightly alienated by the brutality of the way he kills grasshoppers and fish, as described, but I suppose it’s all in a day’s fishing. There’s symbolism here. The town where he disembarks the train is burnt to the ground. Across the river from where he is fishing the land and water turn into an impenetrable swamp. He is cocooned between them. Maybe the highly formal two parts are supposed to suggest how broken Adams is, but I suggest reading them together and consecutively. It’s kind of mysterious how it works so well—one of those stories.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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