Playing in Hemingway’s shadow

Playing in Hemingway’s shadow.

If you are a certain age and you happen to read, fish and in your spare time do a little thinking at some point you run into Hemingway.  I’ve been bumping into Hemingway on and off for most of my life.  When I was in my early 20’s, discovering how much I liked to read, I remember a Time magazine review of Thomas McGuane’s Ninety-two Degrees in the Shade.  The Time interviewer asked McGuane who he liked to read.  McGuane said, “He liked all the Americans Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck.”  He handed me my reading list.

I started with Hemingway because I liked to read books with big print and wide margins.  I could knock them off pretty quickly go down to a bar and drink heavily while feeling slightly literary.  Hemingway would get a little tight, while I got totally shit faced.  There was something romantic, adventuresome and purely American for me in his novels.  So, I read them all and his short stories and anything that mentioned Hemingway I read.  At the time of his death the three most widely recognized words in English around the world were Singer (for the sewing machine), Coca Cola and Hemingway.   Not bad for a kid from Oak Park, Illinois.

We had a Professor of English from an Ivy League College on one of our Smith Rivers trips who would make these wonderful declarations about literature.  “Jane Austin wrote the perfect novel with Emma,” he said.  Or, “The Great Gatsby is the American Novel.”  Having no fears of being thought an idiot I declared, “All of Hemingway starts with A Big Two Hearted River.”  It sounded good and I think there is an element of truth in it.  The Professor like anyone else who has anything to do with the outdoors and a fly rod has dealt with Hemingway.  So you have a middle-age fishing guide and an older Ivy League Professor sparing about Hemingway on a river in the middle of nowhere Montana forty years after Hemingway’s death.  I call it the somethingness of Hemingway.