The Fish in the Log (part 2)

Jan 02, 2023

…Reading that first book Donald Junkins assigned, In Our Time, I was surprised to find so many stories with strong, creative women, men awash in their violent, shallow ways of seeing the world, so at times it even seemed to me as if a woman had written the stories…. Then I came to the long, two-part story “Big Two-Hearted River,” that final, seemingly eventless story, and I was blown away. I think some of my response to that collection and to that story in particular had to do with finally being ready to read and understand Hemingway. I had stepped beyond the world of abstract, speculative thought and into the literal stream, into the heart from which all speculative reason emerges, a place that nothing presupposes, where direct contact with the world precedes thought, makes it possible. I had become an angler. So many academics never go here, I realized. Though it’s a cliché to be sure, so many of them stay always in the ether of their high towers. Like Plato’s cave dwellers, they prefer the shadows on the wall cast from cut out shapes of actual things to the real world of forms just beyond those walls.

So there was Nick Adams coming down into that burned over landscape, but “the river was there”—an eternal force unscathed by the big fire that had burned all else right to the foundations staining its grasshoppers black through and through. And there were the trout, “keeping themselves steady in the current,” still alive, eternal, untouched by the disasters of humankind.

As I read “Big Two Hearted River” for the first time ever, I was literally shaken, powerfully—mystically is not too strong a word here—transported. How could this be? Here was a story where nothing happens. A guy goes to a river and catches fish. There’s not another character, no overt conflict or “compelling” drama even, no traditional rising action, climax. There’s especially no plying of the human psyche, no stepping into Nick’s subconscious. Nearly all of the hand-holds that readers of literary fiction look to (especially graduate students in English) were absent. And yet…there’s that tingle at the back of my neck, here I am breathless again as I finish reading the story for the hundredth time and find Nick at the end looking to the swamp beyond the river.

The scene that really sent me (and it sends me every single time I read it) is when Nick hooks the huge trout inside the hollow log. The stuck-right-down-the-middle hopper floating perfectly into the center of that dark place, that magnificent pull and fight, his rod pulsing alive (and Nick desperate not to lose this one, like the great fish that had broken off earlier, suddenly gone, the rod light and dead and Nick needing to sit down and have a smoke…). I started to look to the story in the way I’d look at a painting. I thought of Dutch landscapes and how often a bowl placed upside down reflects the whole canvas you’re viewing on its convex surface—the way every image of the story held and reflected not only the imagery in that story itself, but images and moments from the whole collection. It seemed that I was there, inside of it too, living it all. Nothing I had read up to then had ever made me feel this way.

There was the alive river running through the center of all that nothingness, the post-fire emptiness and blackness. There was the living trout and Nick connecting to it’s heart-like “pumping,” lying in wait in the center of the hollow log…. The image of the living river in the midst of the burned away landscape is not only reflected in the image of the living trout inside the hollow center of the dead thing, the hollow log, it transforms both images into a beating heart in the midst of lifeless shells. This motif carries throughout the story, even to the title, which everyone knows by now is the name of a different river, that the Fox River runs through Seney, but that name, the nearby, “Big Two-Hearted River,” needed to be the title, that name evoking imagistic echoes throughout —as when Nick guts a trout, hollows it out like the empty-inside log, and holds it in the water and notes that it still looks alive. And with Nick attached and then unattached and sent reeling, we find that these simple (and not so simple) juxtapositions of imagery without commentary provide all the tension and drama one needs, all the complexity of thought, the abstractions emerging on their own terms. In fact, they make the tension and meaning all the more powerful in that they are unspoken but absolutely felt, experienced.

After reading and re-reading the story then and for many years and teaching it to many students of my own, I have always identified with Nick’s intense need to replenish something through the simple, ritualistic act of fishing—to connect to the alive, beating heart of the world as a way to combat feelings of emptiness, deadness…. As a graduate student, it spoke so strongly to me because it told the story I was in the process of enacting—coming into direct contact with the world after several years of living in a world of abstraction—reconnecting with my joy of catching fish, feeling the rush of a stream against my legs. This is why I cringe when I hear even admirers of Hemingway reducing the story to an overt theme: Nick has been in WWI, he’s shell-shocked and needs to get back in touch with something he loves from before the war, etc….

But those trout were just trout, by God, like the ones I had watched holding steady in the Swift and Deerfield and Westfield rivers, and while connecting with them stood as a kind of answer to the inauthenticity of the academy, it also stood for nothing but what it was—no symbols here, no “hidden” meaning, just a pure, straight from the hip to the heart meaning.

And as always, at the end of the story, Nick looks to the swamp where the fish will be bigger but impossible to land, the water too deep, too many tree roots to get tangled in, the fishing “tragic.” I look to these passages more and more with the steady progress of time. The story is framed by the dry, empty bleakness of the burned land at one end and the deep, dangerous darkness of the swamp at the other—the first a tragedy, the second “tragic.” Like Nick, like all of us, life winds its way through tragedies like the fire that has destroyed Seney (and comedies). But these are nothing compared to the swamp, the deeper, more complex and universal and powerful, eternal forces with which we either choose to grapple or not in our lives, the kinds of things that fly fishing can lead us to the edges of, if we pay close enough attention—these contacts and wrestlings and possessings which always hover so close, like that swamp just over there on the other side of the river where the quarry is so much greater, but not landable….

That Hemingway saw so deeply into the nature of life at such an early age is remarkable. There I was at the same age as him when he wrote the story, in my mid-twenties—still open-minded enough to listen, sill relatively untainted by the powerful forces at work in the academic world I was on the verge of joining. Perhaps you have to become young again, move back in contact with the stuff of the world—a contact that makes things like philosophy or great literature possible—to read Hemingway well. It’s as if Hemingway strips away the abstract, theoretical and problematic (and dead) structures of thought to get us to see the highly condensed, pregnant, volatile (beating-alive) center of an idea.

Which is a fancy way of saying what Don said so perfectly all those years ago, “Hemingway gives me courage.” For anglers, we’re already halfway home. Hemingway speaks to us because he has tapped into the self-same well that sustains and enriches our lives (and not just in his fishing stories), a place of deep contact, of unity, albeit fleetingly, with life’s deepest heart.

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The Fish in the Log (part 2)

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