Benewah Creek Road in the panhandle of Idaho is a road I have traveled countless times in my life. Rough, pitted, and pocked gravel, it indirectly links US 95 and State Route 5. The road meanders through dense forests of second and third growth stands of Douglas Fir, Western Larch, and White Pine, desultorily winding by houses and homesteads and the remnants of houses and homesteads. In some cases nothing of these dwellings remains but patches of cleared meadow surrounded by mysterious, silent fragments of domestication and habitationâclematis vines, lilac bushes, downed fences, rusted engines, and baling wire. I know the names of some of the families who once lived in now-empty stretches of meadow; these emptinesses are so prominent in the perception of this landscape that locals often give directions to one another with geographical references like âgo three miles past where the Murray place used to be.â
If you know nothing about the place, you drive this road and, very likely, notice the closeness of the trees, the rough contours of the houses, the pervasive road dust in the dry months, the uncomfortable washboard rattling of your vehicle. A person would have no reason to drive this road unless she lived somewhere along it, or knew someone who did. I know Benewah Creek Road well, and each time I drive on it I look out and think about how this place was created. I have read about the history of the area and the way it was shaped by Idahoâs timber industry; I consider myself a kind of insider here, a native with almost forty yearsâ worth of acquired place-knowledge under my belt. I used to take baths in the creek when my familyâs cabin had no water.
Driving eastward along Benewah Creek Road, you once would have passed the hulking, empty ruins of the Hodgson Lumber Mill (it has since been torn down). The abandoned mill, when it was still standing, was a remnant of local industry and failed human ambition sitting on the right side of the road, down a small slope, and next to Benewah Creek. The rusted teepee burner and the inclined chute that carried waste wood from the mill behind it was a geographical site so well known to me that I often passed by it but never gave it any thought at all. I am old enough to remember the mill when it was running, to recall seeing smoke rise from the cone-shaped trash burner. Yet it took a close reading of Ernest Hemingwayâs short story âThe End of Somethingâ for me to see that I was not looking carefully or thoughtfully enough at the place.
I was first assigned âThe End of Somethingâ in a graduate seminar on Hemingway. Afterward, I wrote a short essay on his careful attention to geography in that story, describing his focus on the ruins of the Hortons Bay mill and its function as more than âbackgroundâ on which Nick and Marjorieâs drama unfolded. In reading the story I saw the way that, for Hemingway, these charactersâ connections to and history in Hortons Bay was as central to the storyâs meaning as was their breakup. It seemed to me that place-knowledge was the heart of the story. I realized that Hemingwayâs abandoned lumber mill did not need to symbolize Nick and Marjorieâs relationship in order to be important: it was important for what it was, for what it told of the communityâs history. It spoke of geographical change, loss, and human failure. Reading the story of Hemingwayâs fictional place changed my perception of an actual one. It called to my mind, with new, stark lucidity, lines from Robert Frostâs âDirective,â where the speaker describes a different abandoned place: âa house that is no more a house/ Upon a farm that is no more a farm/ And in a town that is no more a townâ (5â7, 377). The lesson in Frostâs poem became clearer: time and place can be âmade simple by the loss/ of detailâ (2â3, 377), and we often need a guide to help us see how to regain the complexity of the past.
The very next week I drove on that same stretch of Benewah Creek Road, passed the abandoned Hodgson mill, and began to see what Hemingway had to teach me about places I had not been seeing carefully. The geography of Benewah Valley had once been mute: reading Hemingway made it speak.
***
In an excised section of âA Natural History of the Deadâ (a piece intended to be part of Chapter 12 of Death in the Afternoon) Hemingway wrote about a place near where he had been wounded during World War I in July 1918, a stretch of farmland close to the Piave River in Italy:
In the end of June on the lower Piave the grain is ripe and now in early July it was past the time when it should have been cut but there was no one there to cut it and, as I went along the road, I was thinking of this, noting how little actual damage the standing grain had sustained even though it had been fought through in the Italian advance to the river bank and thinking how, when boys, we had been pursued, caught, and chastised by farmers for going through a field of standing grain just before harvest and yet here were fields of grain through which a battle had been fought and the grain only down in a few clumps and in single patches that marked the position of the dead and there were no farmers here to harvest it although the fighting had been over for some time and I was sure it was now too late to harvest the grain that year even if there had been no question of unexploded hand grenades and shells. It would shell out of the heads from overripeness. So as I went along, pushing the bicycle, since this road was too badly broken up to make riding pleasant, even though the fields this far back from the river were little marked, I noticed how the trees had been marked and splintered occasionally by machine gun fire and wondered when I would be back in the mountains and what would they be doing in Schio that night. (quoted in Beegel, Hemingwayâs Craft, 43)
This passage, though Hemingway cut it from the final manuscript, is remarkable for several reasons, chief among them the way that it provides access to Hemingwayâs interpretive consciousness. He passes through a landscape and observes it closely, but he also sees more than what is visible to the eye alone. Hemingway deciphers the codes of this Italian countryside. He takes into account the season, the month, the ripened condition of the grain, the normal customs of the grain farmers, and the way the recent battle interfered with those customs. Together these constitute something much more than a mere visual, scenic description of a landscape. This is memory-mapping; this is also a mapping of memory. This is âpalimpsestic terrainâ (Unruh 137) where layers of history, experience, and emotion stratify and culminate in the textual presentation of place. Hemingway interprets the land to build a thick geography, one that includes both human and nonhuman influences that have all helped form this land in its present condition. Hemingwayâs interpretive act becomes personal in the way that his reconstruction of the landscape, and his reading of it, is made possible due to memories of his own childhood. His memories of grain farmers chasing him out of fields ready for harvestâboyhood memoriesâconvey to him the seriousness of the war as he interprets the unharvested grain around him. Looking at a few âclumpsâ and âpatchesâ of flattened grain, he sees at the same time a battlefield where soldiers fell and died. Literary geography here mixes close representational observation with acquired place-knowledge and personal reverie.
Hemingway was a skilled and sensitive reader of landscapes. For him this ability was both a talent as well as a compulsionâbiographer Michael Reynolds notes that â[h]e studied terrain the way some men study the stock marketâ (Final Years 34). Hemingway could not turn off this interpretive instinct in his brain, nor does he ever appear to wish to, and no matter where he traveled or what he saw he could not resist reading the land. Examples of his geographical aesthetic are not difficult to find. The results of this impulse appear, quite literally, almost everywhere in his writing, published and unpublished, public and private, early and late in his career: his carefully observed geographies appear both in his boyhood letters and in his adult correspondences; they are integral to his earliest newspaper dispatches from Europe, his initial attempts at short fiction, his more mature masterpieces (both fiction and nonfiction) and his late-career writing like A Moveable Feast. While the manner in which Hemingway creates geographies differs at varying points in his career, in this book I make the case that geography was always central to his life and his work.
Let me make clear that I am not saying simply that Hemingwayâs writing is rich in descriptive geographic detailâthough such details certainly add depth and authenticity to his writing and therefore to its appeal. âFew writers have been more place-conscious [than Hemingway],â writes Carlos Baker (quoted in Lutwack 217), and that place-consciousness had its roots in his youth. As a child, Hemingway learned his keenly curious, observational, and interpretive eye from his family, particularly his father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, who trained his son in the Agassiz method of naturalistic observation in which students practiced careful and close examination of the natural world. Clarence Hemingway had in turn learned this method from his own mother, Adelaide Hemingway, who taught her children and grandchildren how to study ânature at root sourceâ (Reynolds YH 30). But Hemingway learned to read nature from diverse sources, including his education at Oak Park High School (where his zoology teacher Ada Weckel exposed him to Darwinian evolutionary science) and his own disciplined inquiry about the places in which he lived and worked. As Hemingway matured, these powers broadened into an ability to sense the complex ecology of a particular place.
Curiously, that Hemingway was highly âplace-consciousâ is a feature of his work that has long been observed yet simultaneously understudied. Hidden in plain sight almost everywhere in his work, that place-consciousness was a source of great pleasure for Hemingway and was, arguably, a crucial motive to create art as well as a dominant feature of the art itself. To reread Hemingway in this wayâas a literary and cultural geographerâcan teach us about how real places become imaginative spaces, about how the terrains of the material world and of the imagination influence one another. Hemingwayâs âcreative imagination was primarily âtopographical,â â writes Stephen Tanner; âhis fiction has its principle source in the richly nuanced experience of place and its principal effect in conducting readers to that placeâ (Tanner 83â4). In fact Hemingway regularly tried to explain place to his readers as might a cultural geographer. Sometimes his technique is historic or didactic (Jake Barnes explains in The Sun Also Rises, as he walks over the countryside outside Burguete, Spain, that âthe grass was short from the sheep grazingâ). At other times the writing is mainly scenic, as in For Whom The Bell Tolls, when Robert Jordan first sees the bridge he must destroy silhouetted âdark against the steep emptiness of the gorgeâ; in still other passages the geography is best described as psychological or affective, as in âThe Three-Day Blowâ when the narrative voice situates the story in place by informing readers that â[i]n back was the garage, the chicken coop and the second-growth timber like a hedge against the woods behind. The big trees swayed far over in the wind as he watched. It was the first of the autumn storms.â In each instance Hemingway gives readers the information they need to understand fully the places in which his characters find themselves. Why is the grass short on the meadows in the Spanish countryside? Because sheep graze there. In what way does Robert Jordan first catch sight of the bridge he must later destroy? He sees it in âthe sudden short trueness of the little lightâ left before the sun sets in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains that lie between Madrid and Segovia (35). Why does one line of trees in âThe Three-Day Blowâ sit âlike a hedgeâ against another, taller line of more mature trees? Because the logging industry played a large part in shaping this northern Michigan geography, and the second-growth timber comes up thicker and smaller after the old-growth trees are cut. Readers in each case are asked to understand placeâto interpret environmentâwith more agility than the traditional literary apparatus of âsettingâ or âsceneâ may afford them.
Much of this book, then, is about teaching and learning place. It is about the importance of geography for Hemingway as a person and as an artist. It is an investigation of his narrative geographical constructions (and geographical instructions) that generate meaning for, and insight about, his fictional characters and his readers alike. But it is equally a study of the stand-alone value he imparts to the places themselves. Hemingwayâs literary geographies are consistently natural, historical, personal, and cultural; they show Hemingwayâs interest in and value for life-in-places in all its forms. He describes places on multiple planes, often documenting the changes that have played out there on both human and nonhuman levels, while also eliciting a striking interconnectedness between his characters and their physical environments. In this sense his sensitivity to topography and to the nuances of geography and landscape show him to be a humanist geographer in the contemporary sense of the term, but his writing does not only depict places as human constructs.
Hemingway once remarked that when it comes to art in general, â[u]nless you have geography, background, you have nothingâ (quoted in McComas 46). I take âbackgroundâ here to mean not something subordinate or retiring but ratherâand much more importantlyâto refer to the provenance of a place, of how it got to be what it now is. Hemingwayâs first collection of short stories, In Our Time, was published in 1925, some fifty years prior to the humanist renaissance in the field of geography; of course he could not then have been aware of what we now call cultural or humanist geography. But Hemingway possessed many of the same curiosities about place, place histories, and place textures, that humanist geographers and spatial theorists now bring to their studies about landscape, place, and culture. He wrote with a strong and consistent geographical aesthetic: a way of rendering people in placeâand place in peopleâthat ties together much of his large body of work. His writing consistently documents the intimate connections between people and their environments. Place-knowledge is for Hemingway a fully embodied knowing, a sensuous dwelling.
Let me also make clear, then, that I do not consider Hemingwayâs literary places as mere âsettingsâ for events or as backdrops against which âcharacterâ can be expressed. âSettingâ is a formal literary convention, but Hemingway appears to have little interest in relegating place to the âbackgroundâ in that sense. My choice of the term âgeographyâ over the more conventional literary term âsettingâ is deliberate. To discuss Hemingwayâs constructions of place as settings implies that they play a secondary role. It suggests that their purpose is primarily scenic. On the contrary, Hemingwayâs places themselves are central to his writing and his creative process in ways that have not yet been explored in a book-length study. Scholars hitherto have singled out the complexity and importance of particular places for Hemingwayânotably Michigan, Key West, the Gulf Stream, Paris, Africa, and Idaho, among othersâand have carefully documented the overlap between these ârealâ places and the fictionalized ones (see, e.g., H.R. Stonebackâs Reading Hemingwayâs The Sun Also Rises for wonderful place-annotations of Paris). Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera has recently discussed the status of Hemingwayâs expatriate protagonists and the ways that not-belonging in place shapes them. A valuable collection of essays (Mark Cirino and Mark P. Ottâs Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory) highlights the complex, interwoven relationship between memory, nostalgia, and place in Hemingwayâs writing. Finally, a burgeoning field of Hemingway criticism examines his sometimes difficult, conflicted conceptions of âwildernessâ and the natural world, a topic which overlaps some of the arguments about place that I make here. But to date no one has investigated, in a book-length work, a wider, fuller range of Hemingwayâs geographiesâonly the geographiesâto tease out their material, historical, narrative and emotive complexities.
The cool interior of a Pamplona cathedral, a sandwich dipped in river water to wash its crumbs away, the sight of an ornamental garden in bare, chilly November: I am fascinated by Hemingwayâs attention to place, by the complexity of his material details, by the way he constantly reminds us of the relationship between people, objects-in-place, memories of past places, and geography itself. In his vast body of work, places can be Hemingwayâs agents for characterization or access to interiority, especially with those characters who appear wholly or almost-wholly reticent. But the places themselves are much more than this. Hemingway was immersed in the sensuality, the history, and the materiality of each and every environment in which he spent time and which he ultimately brought to life in his writings. He and his characters dwell in places both real and imagined and composites of each. Hemingway was in this sense a self-taught and natural geographer, always concerned to know how people shapedâand in turn were shaped byâtheir environment. It could be argued that he attempted to answer this question in nearly everything he ever wrote.
Hemingwayâs Geographies brings together a great many disparate elements of Hemingway criticism; it positions some of Hemingwayâs literary geographies alongside one another and offers up new readings of well-traveled terrain. This book does not represent an attempt to establish a developmental arc in terms of Hemingwayâs geographical aesthetic: instead I simply aim to show examples, drawn widely from his letters as well as his fiction and nonfiction, of how this place-aesthetic was always there. I do not focus on Hemingwayâs larger posthumous works like The Garden of Eden, Islands in the Stream, and Under Kilimanjaro, though these narratives also contain textual moments that support the interpretations I offer here (I do hope, however, that the readings I present in Hemingwayâs Geographies gesture toward these manuscripts in ways that future scholars may find useful). I will not document each and every instance of Hemingwayâs geographical aesthetic; there are far too many examples of it to do so reasonably. Instead, my selections of Hemingwayâs textual geographies are intended to be illustrative. I hope that the texts I include in this work will open up new lines of conversation about Hemingwayâs geographical sensibility and about the careful attention he always paid, from the very beginning of his career, not just to rendering details of the physical world but also to explaining the natural...