"Big Two-Hearted River Part I" Podcast is Live!
After too long a time, I’ve finally completed the first part of my podcasts on Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River,” which you can find HERE. This marks my 9th episode of “Hemingway Word for Word,” and nearly completes my podcasts on Hemingway’s first collection of short stories, "In Our Time.”
Here are a few brief excerpts from the the show to hopefully make you want to give it a listen:
The two-parted story that ends the collection In Our Time, “Big Two-Hearted River,” stands out as one of the great examples of Hemingway’s artistic approach—what he famously likened to an iceberg, where much of the meaning lies beneath the surface—the structure of the prose—with its carefully ordered repetitions (chiasmuses) and dynamically rich metaphorical layering of imagery—used always as a painter layers colors, shapes, textures onto a canvas. With this story, Hemingway was also clearly working to tie together all the smaller canvases of the earlier stories in the collection into one complete, breathtakingly larger whole. While the story can certainly be read on its own, reading it in the context of the entire collection—and especially the other 8 stories I have looked at in this podcast so far—helps us to discover a still richer meaning. “Soldier’s Home” in particular serves as near-necessary preamble….
…Working backwards in a sense, this sequence suggests a “reason” why Nick is looking so deeply and has come here in the first place. He is here to look deep. To look fully, and to “feel all the old feeling.” He tells us it has been a long time since he has looked into a stream and seen trout… Nick comes here to pay close attention to things once essential to him, things he hopes will restore something essential, emotions that may well be hidden equally deep and are equally hard to discern, only seen at first through their shadows. He may well be wanting this deep “heart tightening” thing to also break free, like the trout, to smash through the surface into the air. That the trout first tightens into its “post,” that same word used to describe Nick’s very heart — as “tightening”—suggests Nick is making this connection, seeing the one as a way to transfer an emotion directly to the other. That word, “tight” also retains the meaning it acquired in the earlier story, “Cat in the Rain,” where the woman feels something “small and tight” inside of her when she watches the Padrone—the image of him, as with the image of the small “tight” cat, her hair that she wants to feel in a “tight” bun, evoking a powerfully rich understanding and giving her the ability to express her needs (despite her husband not understanding)…
There was no underbrush in the island of pine tress. The trunks of the trees went straight up or slanted toward each other. The trunks were straight and brown without branches. The branches were high above. Some interlocked to make a solid shadow on the brown forest floor. Around the grove of trees was a bare space. It was brown and soft underfoot as Nick walked on it. There was the over-lapping of the pine needle floor, extending out beyond the width of the high branches. The trees had grown tall and the branches moved high, leaving in the sun this bare space they had once covered with shadow. Sharp at the edge of this extension of the forest floor commenced the sweet fern…He looked up at that sky, through the branches, and then shut his eyes. He opened them and looked up again. There was a wind high up in the branches. He shut his eyes again and went to sleep.
I find this moment in the story particularly striking. This island of pines with its trees and branches all entangled and growing and leaving behind a sunlit space that’s still bare from when they shaded it (almost a personification of the trees, as if they intended to do this) speaks to how carefully Nick is looking at things, how he traces the origins of this comforting, restful place where he can’t help but feel a deep peacefulness and surrender to sleep. The scene is reminiscent of another Nick Adam’s story, “The Last Good Country.” In that story Nick runs away into the back country to escape a game warden after being accused of poaching, and his youngest sister manages to sneak away and follow him… They hide out in a virgin forest, another uncut islands of pines, and there he describes them to his sister as “This is the last good country there is left…That’s why they build cathedrals to be like this”—comparing the high quiet of a virgin forest to the high quiet of a cathedral. The constant references to the tangled branches above and the way the light shines on the bare spot are even suggestive to me of light coming through the stained glass windows of a cathedral. And I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch here to say that Nick arrives to a place that feels holy, is deeply, spiritually fulfilling, this small, sun-filled bare space not unlike a kind of dais or alter. Nick’s journey here is surely spiritual, is one of healing and rebirth, of moving well beyond the scarred and burned-away world of war to a place that will hopefully change him back to being alive, to feeling his own beating heart.
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Be sure to check out my podcast, “Hemingway, Word for Word.”