HEMINGWAY AND NATURE

I BELIEVE THAT HEMINGWAY’S NATURALIST’S EYE—THE sharpness required to have such sensitivity to detail—helped wire his brain toward becoming the writer we recognize and admire. I would even go further and say it is from this wiring that his best sentences emerge. His best writing.

Art is selectivity. In learning to hunt trout in northern Michigan, or birds, he was training his brain to choose: to see, and then select. Much of hunting is about being careful—about moving slowly. The wind has to be quartering just right. Clues are generally small. Often, instinct is paramount. To hunt is to be immersed in a sea of the specific. No ideas but in things, wrote William Carlos Williams. In learning to hunt and fish, Hemingway was learning, in every step, to be a writer.

I believe that the hunter’s eye, heightened by a desire so ancient it could be said to be the founding principle of our essence—how we got here, and how we survived, and still do—eat or die—was so developed in Hemingway that it not only shaped his craft, but for a while became it. He entered each day’s work like nothing but a hunter, or an angler. His days in the woods directed his pen: where to turn, when to go downhill or uphill. Where and when to lift his head to better take in the scent. When to pause next to a tree and grow invisible, and watch. Being in the forest, with the quarry hiding or moving away, is truer to the iceberg that Hemingway described—the unseen and unannounced, the story just beneath the surface—than is an iceberg itself.

There are moments in all hunters’ experience when, after a long and arduous journey, they come into the country of game, whether one sees the animal or not. You know it’s there. This is the same neural blossoming—the epiphany—known to the writer who, after traveling long and hard in the landscape of the story, happens upon the thing long searched for, as if beneath the surface, but not yet seen. The brain is a cathedral, the brain is a map, and because of his time in the woods as a boy and then a young man, Hemingway was being made into a writer before he was a writer.

Nobody needs to be told that Hemingway was a tortured soul in battle with himself. Or that anger is essentially the same thing as fear. One of his first stories, “Three Shots”—written in a style so clean it appeared to have been transcribed from the stone tablets of a different time, a different world—confronts this fear, the fear of fear, from the very beginning.

“Last night in the tent he had had the same fear. He never had it except at night. It was more a realization than a fear at first. But it was always on the edge of fear and became fear very quickly when it started.”

None of us need to be told that in Hemingway’s daily self-generated internal battles, greatness was created. Genius flowed up like a plume of rock dust, bits and glints of ice burning phosphorescent, friction-ground and glowing, supercharged.

(It makes one wonder: what hope is there for us ordinary folks? What is to become of us, we, the untortured?)

But I don’t want to belabor his fear, or the luminous residue of his soul’s battle, phosphorescent as the tips of the sharks’ fins at night, slicing the water as they feast on an old man’s swordfish, eating everything but the sword. (How wonderful that in the old man’s ever-battling delirium he considers sawing off the sword from the ravaged fish and using it as a spear to continue his struggle against the sharks. “Fight them,” he says to himself, even after there is no fish left to fight for. “I’ll fight them until I die.”)

Instead of exploring the battles, however, I am more interested in the balm of the woods that he sought instinctively. A wounded animal will always run downhill, he reminds us. (Well, almost always. When Hemingway shoots and wounds a couple of eagles, he provides us with the curious piece of natural history—indeed, how else might any of the rest of we non-eagle shooters have known this?—that a wounded eagle is perhaps the sole exception to this rule, or tendency, in that it will scramble madly uphill—as if trying to find a launch site from which to hurl its crippled self into one last attempt at flight, and escape.)

We see the hold that the woods have for him in “Big Two-Hearted River,” where nature—a nurturing if not loving nature—has the young protagonist in its full grip. The world does not need another essay on this story, but one never tires of reading or rereading a great classic, and this one illustrates to me again how the secret heart of nearly every story lies buried just beneath the surface of the best prose. In “Big Two-Hearted River,” to switch analogies, we find the mountain the writer has been moving toward—perhaps led or urged toward, seeking. Hunting. This is the flat-topped pure white mountain of Kilimanjaro with the frozen leopard lying in the snow, rising nearly four miles above the sea.

The best writing is almost always the most specific writing, with the writer so close to their quarry—in Hemingway’s case, contentment or relief, if not the deeper treasure, peace—that the abstractions of grand ideas are not needed.

“Big Two-Hearted River” is, like most great stories, about more than one thing; one of the things it is about is the battle, or rather the inextinguishable relationship, between fire and water. The fire or animus of the living, propelling all things forward while consuming them at the same time; the refuge and healing quality of water.

In “Big Two-Hearted River,” the young Hemingway, not yet debilitated by the world and his wars, has discovered the mother lode of peace, and we read it for this. Here, in the Nick Adams stories, he is a hunter-gatherer, selecting trout from the river as he would individual words and images in other stories—“the heat-light over the plain”—“There were four crows walking in the green field”—“The sunlight shone through the empty glasses on the table.”

Here, the object of his journey has already been reached. Here, it is not a struggle for fire or water to triumph but to locate and then inhabit for a little while that place of dynamic tension where the two move against and then with each other. A condition we would call a temporary peace.

“Nick sat down against the charred stump and smoked a cigarette. His pack balanced on the top of the stump, harness holding ready, a hollow molded in it from his back. Nick sat smoking, looking out over the country. He did not need to get his map out. He knew where he was from the position of the river.

“As he smoked, his legs stretched out in front of him, he noticed a grasshopper walk along the ground and up onto his woolen sock. As he had walked along the road, climbing, he had started many grasshoppers from the dust. They were all black. They were not the big grasshoppers with yellow and black or red and black wings whirring out from their black wing sheathing as they fly up. These were just ordinary hoppers, but all a sooty black in color . . . He realized that the fire must have come the year before, but the grasshoppers were all black now. He wondered how long they would stay that way.”

Nick rises, loads up the weight of his pack, his burden in that blackened land, and begins walking again, toward the distant river and the distant hills. He picks sprigs of the heathery sweet fern and places them under his pack straps so he can smell the crushed scent of it as he walks. He travels through the fern, which grows ankle high, and through the pines—“a long undulating country with frequent rises and descents, sandy underfoot, and the country alive again.”

Fire and water. “Nick tucked two big chips of pine under the grill. The fire flared up. He had forgotten to get water for the coffee . . . he walked down the hill, across the edge of the meadow, to the stream . . . The water was ice cold . . . [He] put some more chips under the grill onto the fire . . .”

It seems Nick’s lighting a match on nearly every page. The temptation to tear down is strong. There is a part of him that is already charred and blackened. Maybe it will heal but likely not. “He did not feel like going down into the swamp.” He did not want to engage in that battle, the one of healing or accepting himself. Better to fight.

Back and forth Nick goes, hunting an internal curling-up place—drawn always to the fire. In his tent, a mosquito hums close to his ear. Nick sits up and lights a match, moves the match quickly up to the mosquito. The mosquito makes a satisfactory hiss in the flame. This is troubling to those of us gifted with the more accurate vision of hindsight. There are, already, boxers, and guns, throughout these woods—even in the idyll, the refuge. They are in his head—but so too is the nature that feeds him—wild trout from a wild river—even as he’s eating crap food from can after can.

He is poised at an edge. I think because of his hungers, Hemingway makes a misstep here and begins to equate hunting with killing. It was a common enough perspective of the times. Still is. Nature was doing its good work on his burning mind—imprinting in him deeply, indelibly, the power of the specific—no ideas but in things. Lying there in his tent, however, he—or his protagonist, Nick—turns away from the balm of a non-game nature and toward battle, and those damned guns.

In “Fathers and Sons,” we see “the shotgun loaded and cocked,” we see Nick “looking across at his father sitting on the screen porch reading the paper and thought, I can blow him to hell. I can kill him.”

(This comes at the very end of the Nick Adams stories and as all writers know, what we put at the end of things matters a great deal. Just preceding “Fathers and Sons,” in “Summer People,” we see again, through the luminosity of prose, one of the secret hearts of the story in these woods-wandering, seeking tales.)

“Halfway down the gravel road from Hortons Bay, the town, to the lake, there was a spring. The water came in a tile, sunk beside the road, lipping over the cracked edge of the tile and flowing away through the close-growing mint into the swamp. In the dark Nick put his arm down into the spring but could not hold it there because of the cold. He felt the featherings of the sand spouting up from the spring cones at the bottom against his fingers. Nick thought, I wish I could put all of myself in there. I bet that would fix me.”

“Ten Indians” contains more of the balm of the non-game, non-hunted nature that he recognized he needed but left behind in his rush to be needed and useful—a provider, a village hunter.

“When he awoke in the night he heard the wind in the hemlock trees outside the cottage and the waves of the lake coming in on the shore, and he went back to sleep. In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.”

No, his heart was not broken, or he would not have forgotten. He was so close. He was mapping in his mind the paths to relief and even peace. He had it—contentment and, briefly, balance—right there in the palm of his hand.

Hemingway was a hunter, probably long before he knew he was a writer. Step by step, far from academia, in the cooling shade of the forest, he built and then polished his brain into the generator—creative and destructive—that would power the vessel of his body and his craft. He was always looking for something. This is what hunters do. There is an absence, a need, and they move toward it. Sometimes hugely.

Having never hunted in the manner Hemingway did once he got to Africa, and certainly having not lived in the context of the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, when all the lead was flying, I yet cannot help but wonder if Hemingway himself did not feel a great ambivalence with regard to Africa’s roving artillery, this caravan of the group hunt, with gun men, trackers, spotters, drivers. Much of True at First Light involves him trying to talk Mary out of her lion-killing lust—even though we know the lion is going to die, else it would not be in his work. That would be a different writer indeed.

There is another aspect in which hunting and fishing (and nature) likely informed the writer. Death, and learning how to end a story: again, the woods made him into a writer. I don’t know what he would have been, without the woods. A boxer. A football coach. A fishing or hunting guide.

Death, and learning closure as a writer: we can see, again and again, how in being so versed in death—drawn toward the thing he feared, and with death the logical terminus of hunting—Hemingway built his brain to serve him as a writer of good endings. Of learning—training, calibrating himself—to be sensitive to and recognize the stillness when a thing is over. This is a more organic and better way of achieving an end—far better than trudging as if on a forced march toward a long-ago predetermined ending. Instead, the recognized or happened-upon ending has more vitality, is more natural, and has greater durability—it permeates one’s body with the five senses. It resonates with the unsuspected, the unknown now known. Even the craftiest writer who tries to hide a predetermined ending will carry into it some element of trickery, and hence some separation from, some superiority over the reader from whom he or she has been trying to hide it. Often a sophisticated reader will sense this, even without quite knowing what’s up.

When you go hunting, you don’t know quite what you’ll see, and you don’t know when or where you’ll see it. You know only what you want. You walk—quietly, carefully—until you see the quarry. You come quietly into a clearing and there it is. The End, after a lot of hard damn work.

The guns and alcohol are so overwhelmingly present, in True at First Light and elsewhere, as is death, all manners and ways of it, things crashing down around him. Hunting equals death for Hemingway, and closure, finality, control—the closest space and condition he could find to peace, or contentment. For many of us, nature and even hunting is life and searching, not death and closure, but for Hemingway death was the face of nature—a nature he loved—and in this intimate relationship, Hemingway and nature, as with the relationship between Hemingway and himself, he was on the fence, on a high knife ridge; it could have gone either way. He went into the woods as he went into his prose each day, desperately, fully intent and present, and from the beginning, this shaped the brain he would use later, and through his various batterings and concussions and other debilitations, all his life.

Again, we see it at the very beginning in “Indian Camp”—the bliss and wonder of the artist’s innocence, and the child’s contented innocence, with death nonetheless just beyond. This is an early innocence; the score is still tied essentially zero to zero. It is an innocence that labors like a boatman rowing ever forward.

Even his little writing rules were like a hunter’s: first and foremost, be aware of the wind. Don’t spook one’s quarry. Pay attention to the periphery of things—the calls of birds. (In True at First Light there’s a splendid brief description of Hemingway hearing the alarm call of some small bird and knowing the bird was not scolding at them; that something else, just a little farther on, was on the move.)

His famous blue flame advice about a writer leaving off work each day when you know where you’ll pick up the next: this is the mind of the hunter who, the night before, studies his or her maps intently, dreaming where he or she will set out to the next morning.

And, most famously, the iceberg. To a hunter, it is exactly this way, too, if not more so. Everything is unseen, until finally some one small thing becomes visible. The hunter imagines his or her quarry so intensely that it is like a mix between prayer and dream. The hunter inhabits deeply the landscape of the quarry, just as the good writer inhabits deeply the terrain of the story.

In Africa, the killing had to have been wearing him down. In True at First Light, he calibrated it, punctuated it, with drinking and reading. He continues to justify it by the need for meat, or an animal’s villainy, or even its plain ugliness. An elephant has knocked over a tree. A lion has eaten a goat. An eagle eats a guinea, or a kongoni is old and unattractive, and needs Miss Mary to dispatch it. In midlife, Hemingway changes over to the village hunter. Is it coincidence that his doubts about his writing blossomed as he saw the wearing down of his bloodlust for killing—his reason for being—and sought to find new rationale?

“The time of shooting beasts for trophies was long past with me. I still loved to shoot and to kill cleanly,” he says, as if arguing with himself. “But [now] I was shooting for the meat we needed to eat and to back up Miss Mary and against beasts that had been outlawed for cause and for what is known as control of marauding animals, predators and vermin. I had shot one impala for a trophy and an oryx for meat . . . which had a pair of horns worth keeping . . .”

Any middle-aged hunter knows how next to impossible it is to sustain the drive and hunger that once burned so hot in the younger hunter. It is a mystery of biology, that a thing that was ever once so bright can dim, but it does. Almost always, it does.

Reading True at First Light, it would be easy for many readers to be turned away, to say the least. I myself find pity for the animals whose paths are crossed—Miss Mary’s lion, certainly, with its various four shots—and by all the driving around, looking. More than once, more than twice, Hemingway mentions the American West, as if homesick.

His fire is going out. One of his main reasons for being is deteriorating. His relationship with a nature that invigorated and might have sustained him a bit further—not forever, but further—is faltering, and he knows it.

“Now here in Africa there were beautiful birds around the camp all of the time . . . I could not think how I had become so stupid and calloused about the birds and I was very ashamed.

“For a long time I realized I had only paid attention to the predators, the scavengers and the birds that were good to eat and the birds that had to do with hunting. Then as I thought of which birds I did notice there came such a great long list of them that I did not feel quite as bad but I resolved to watch the birds around our camp more and to ask Mary about all the ones I did not know, and most of all, to really see them and not look past them.

“This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it.”

Nobody needs to be told that Hemingway drank.

“I tried to think how I had gotten into not seeing the small birds around camp and I thought some of it was reading too much to take my mind off the concentration of the serious hunting and some was certainly drinking in camp to relax when we came in from hunting.”

But in True at First Light, there is a lot of drinking, even for Hemingway. Beer for breakfast; beer at first light. Gin for anything that ailed anyone, and something, always, was ailing someone. I am not the first reader to wish we could go back to the Nick Adams stories, before the war that was within Ernest Hemingway began to get the upper hand. There were not enough hours in the day to combat this enemy within: not enough drink, not enough killing, not even enough oh so carefully constructed sentences, fragile crystalline latticed structures of other worlds where all was controlled and things were done a certain way and there were fierce ethics and codes and manners designed to keep those worlds just the way they had been crafted. There were not enough sparring partners to box. Again, even in True at First Light—an attempt to purge, it feels like, one last long killing spree, punctuated by rest and contemplation—he casts about in brief spare moments of boredom, asking if there are any boys he can fight.

The secret heart of any story lies almost always beneath the cleanest prose. When Hemingway is coming back to camp in lighting too dark to kill, he approaches, yet again briefly, his truest and briefest quarry, peace. He writes that he goes for a walk at night with no gun, only a spear, in soft moccasins.

“The spear shaft felt good and heavy and it was taped with surgical tape so that your hand would not slip if it was sweaty . . .”

He describes the stubble beneath his feet.

“Ahead, on the plain, I could see something asleep in the moonlight. It was a wildebeest and I worked away from him . . .

“There were many night birds and plover and I saw bat-eared foxes and leaping hares but their eyes did not shine as they did when we cruised with the Land Rover since I had no light and the moon made no reflection. The moon was well up now and gave a good light and I went along the trail happy to be out in the night not caring if any beast presented himself . . . I looked back and could . . . not see the lights of camp but could see the Mountain high and square topped and [it] shone white in the moonlight and I hoped I would not run onto anything to kill . . .

“So I walked along in the moonlight hearing the small animals move and the birds cry when they rose from the dust of the trail . . .

“I could hear a leopard hunting in the edge of the big swamp to the left. I thought of going on up to the salt flats but I knew if I did I would be tempted by some animal so I turned around and started on the worn trail back to camp looking at the Mountain and not hunting at all.”

He could have been saved. Surely something could have kept such a life force going a little further, a little farther. But what?

That was the African hunting. But what about the American West, which Hemingway so loved, but which, even in his day, he felt had gotten too small? The West even then was being cleaved by roads. (Ironic that in Africa, he scouted so very many animals from cars and gravel roads.) I too believe the West is getting, has gotten, too small, but I love it. We love it. Just because a thing becomes diminished does not mean one stops loving it.

In addition to Hemingway’s love of the West, there was a larger need that sent him to Africa, and to the boundless ocean. As if such spaces represented a hole, an abyss, that would not, could not, be filled. In closing, I want to leave us with an image and an idea: What if Hemingway had looked a little longer at the other side of the divide, at the other view? Nature is not all and only death. What if he had looked harder and longer at the side that is nurturing, creative, generative, nonresistant, flowing? I’m not asking him to put on a happy face here—he came into the game scarred and scared from the very beginning—that deck was stacked against him—but what if Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana had been enough? If he had found larger country—call it wilderness; call it the American wilderness—he might have produced even more and even finer work. But things, as we know, got in the way. There were so many things.

What if he had taken more time to investigate the other side of that divide, to be nurtured and nourished—fed—still using his hunter’s eye to select images, but more frequently searching for, and selecting, the elements of peace? What if those things had found their way more often into his creations—and therefore, into him—in earned and natural fashion?

His gaze was pretty fixed. Now and again Nature tempted him with the peace he sought. And he saw it, he noted it. It is maybe his best writing. But then he turned away and trudged on, marched on. He wanted the appearance of order, not the appearance of chaos. We breathe still the fine white dust raised from his passage.

And the country he left, then returned to, at the end of his middle age, to begin the first days of his old age—a country he himself might have described as being middle-aged and diminished? There’s certainly nothing to be done about it now, I think, except to protect and preserve as much of the West as is possible; to work to restore it, where possible, to a wilder and fuller state, and away from its reduced and damaged condition. We all have hungers and needs for such a country. What side of the divide each of us decides to look down into, and travel into, is our choice, but we need a fuller and wilder West—more wilderness—in order to be able to even have that choice. The freedom of that choice.

I regret and lament that Hemingway felt he had to go to Africa. I wish we had had enough here, even then, to keep him here. I wish it for him and I wish it for myself, and I hope that, with work, we might all yet see that again and more some day.