Walking the Wall

I have to say that I have had to revise my opinion of Hemingway, although I still would not classify him as one of my favorite authors. I have always had the opinion that he was an over-rated, male-chauvinistic, posturing writer that I wasn’t in the least bit interested in giving the time of day. Now, the first few stories in my assignment didn’t change my opinion too much, yes, I could see the craft involved, but not enough to really change my thinking.

Then came a quiet story, a story I really think is one of those stories that slips under your skin and says in a whisper, "This is why you are a Literature major," the kind of story that brings life to the Thoreau’s phrase "quiet desperation". The "Big Two-Hearted River" is at first glance not really about anything, the plot consists of "a man went fishing"–no great action here, no great sweeping story line, just a quiet story about a man who has had some tragic adventure never spoken of who has "left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs" and lost himself in the quietness of walking and building camp and catching grasshoppers and fishing…not because he needs fish, but because he needs to be lost in the silence of doing the familiar. Only in a story that is so calm on action can a two word sentence, "Nick laughed" startle the reader with the understanding that Nick hadn’t laughed in a very long time. While all of the stories I have read of Hemingway have been ambiguous at the end with a lack of concrete resolution, and while Big Two is much the same–it is very different in that the disillusionment that Hemingway embodies in many of his stories ends with a sense of the future, a looking forward. Hope. Beautiful story.

Anyway, it was a pleasant surprise, Nick found "He was in his home where he had made it" and that is a very lovely place to be indeed.