ASLE 2015, Moscow, Idaho

Earth Writing, Geography, and Memory

Laura Godfrey

​Laura Gruber Godfrey is Assistant Chair of the Department of English and Humanities at North Idaho College in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.  Her publications have appeared in journals such as Western American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, Critique, and The Hemingway Review.  Her Hemingway scholarship also appears in the books Hemingway:  Eight Decades of Criticism (Michigan State UP, 2009), Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory (Kent State UP, 2010), and the forthcoming collection Teaching Hemingway and the Natural World (Kent State UP).  Her book, Hemingway’s Geographies:  Intimacy, Materiality, and Memory, is forthcoming in 2016 from Palgrave Macmillan.
Hilary Hawley
Picture
Jonathan Frey
Audrey Cameron
Shelley McEuen

Laura Godfrey
​“…where the shingle mill was…”:  Pleasure and Misery in Hemingway’s Remembered Geographies

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 habitation—clematis vines, lilac bushes, downed fences, rusted engines, 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 ‘go three miles past where the Murray place used to be.’
 
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 Idaho’s timber industry; I consider myself a kind of insider here, a native with almost forty years’ worth of acquired place-knowledge under my belt. I used to take baths in the creek when my family’s 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 Hemingway’s short story “The End of Something” for me to see that I was not looking carefully or thoughtfully enough at the place.
 
I was first assigned “The End of Something” in a graduate seminar on Hemingway. Afterwards, 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 ‘background’ on which Nick and Marjorie’s drama unfolded. In reading the story I saw the way that, for Hemingway, these characters’ connections to and history in Hortons Bay was as central to the story’s meaning as was their breakup. It seemed to me that place-knowledge was the heart of the story. I realized that Hemingway’s abandoned lumber mill did not need to symbolize Nick and Marjorie’s relationship in order to be important: it was important for what it was, for what it told of the community’s history. It spoke of geographical change, loss, and human failure. Reading the story of Hemingway’s fictional place changed my perception of an actual one. It called to my mind, with new, stark lucidity, lines from Robert Frost’s “Directive,” where the speaker describes a different abandoned place: “. . .a 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 town.” The lesson in Frost’s poem became clearer: time and place can be “made simple by the loss/ of detail,” 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.
 
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On June 15, 1961, Ernest Hemingway wrote what would be his last letter, a note to nine year old Fritz Saviers, a boy who was hospitalized with a heart condition. Fritz was the son of George Saviers, Hemingway’s Ketchum doctor and friend. Hemingway wrote from St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, at what would be his final time in the Mayo Clinic, and in the letter he deflects attention from his own predicament onto detailed descriptions of the landscapes of the north country.
 
The letter is heartbreaking. The first time I read it (framed on a wall inside the Sun Valley Lodge, halfway down the long, plush hallway that led to a vast, heated pool) I remember examining this letter for a long space of time, moved by the way Hemingway expressed his fondness for this boy by conjuring images of place and place history, by the way he seemed to want to distract himself—and the young boy—from the gravity of their situations with references to the terrain he saw and the stories hidden within it. Hemingway, apparently hiding his desperation quite well in this note, would commit suicide only seventeen days after writing this letter. The boy, Fritz, also died a few short years later of viral heart disease. And yet Hemingway puts a brave face on things for the sake of the boy, writing in wonder at the beauty of the upper Mississippi country and marveling that he had never traveled here before, to this place rich with history of lumbermen and pioneer trails and bass jumping in the river.
 
It occurred to me then how much geography mattered to Hemingway, and how much place—and the hidden, buried stories and memories existing within places—was a cornerstone of not only his literary aesthetic but of his personal life. I saw in the letter that what happened in a place never really went away for Hemingway. I saw that whether the information he provided was historical or ecological or personal (or some alchemy of all three), his places always seemed to be constructs built of the present and the past. It now makes perfect sense to me that Hemingway constantly sounded the depths of any landscape’s visible, physical features for stories, for meaning and history. This is, after all, the very same technique he demanded of his readers—to look carefully at the simple surface of things to find the tension and the stories buried underneath. The provenance of any place, for Hemingway, is a story in itself. And in his writing he focuses intently on the ways that the non-human and the human world intertwine: of the way humans leave their mark on the physical world, of the ways the earth sustains (or does not) the impact of humans, and of the challenge—and often the attendant misery— of interpreting the resulting ‘codes’ left behind on the land.

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For Hemingway, love of place is inextricably linked with its loss or alteration.There is a singer everyone has heard, As he moved throughout his life, Hemingway returned again and again in his writing to the places he had left behind, trying to preserve what-used-to-be. One lengthy and ultimately discarded passage from Death in the Afternoon (which he began writing in 1930) illustrates Hemingway’s near-obsession with geographical loss and memory of place. In this passage he remembers both Italy and northern Michigan:
 
"[Michigan’s Upper Peninsula] was the first peninsula that I loved; the second one was Italy. . . . It was the north of Italy that I cared about. I never gave a damn about any part of the peninsula south of Milan just as I have never loved France, nor any part of France except Paris and Provence when the wind was not blowing. . . But from Milan to Brescia, to Verona, to Vicenza . . .from Padova to Mestre, up to Treviso, all around the Venetian plain and then up to Borca di Cadore, all of the Dolomites, but especially the country between Toblach and Cortina, I cared about the way I once had felt on coming into the country from Mancelona to Kalkaska, the Boyne Falls grade, the country around the foot of the lake, Wab-Mee-Mee, where the shingle mill was, on into Petoskey, around to Cross Village, looking across Little Traverse Bay, the road to Charlevoix and the road over the hills between Walloon and Horton’s Bay. I loved Northern Italy like a fool, truly, the way I had loved northern Michigan."
 
As he maps these familiar topographies in his prose, Italian landscapes lapse inevitably into descriptions of Northern Michigan—the first countryside he came to know intimately. Hemingway runs over the contours of this place in his mind without any attention to details that someone unfamiliar with the country might want or need to know in order to see it clearly. A description of “the country around the foot of the lake, Wab-Mee-Mee,” for example, is anchored by a reference to “where the shingle mill was.”
 
To describe a place by referencing such insider-memories,  with allusions to what can no longer be seen there, is particularly significant in terms of Hemingway’s developing literary style in the 1920s and early 1930s; his literary landscapes in this period make use of absent things and are often spaces now empty of things that used to be. It is as if the manner in which he learned to closely examine places (which was taught to him throughout his boyhood), came to influence the way in which he crafted his stories. “Few writers have been more place-conscious [than Hemingway],” writes Carlos Baker, and that place-consciousness had its roots in his youth. As a child, Hemingway learned his keenly curious 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 “nature at root source.” But Hemingway learned to read nature from diverse influences, 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.
 
The geographies of some of Hemingway’s early Michigan stories, in a sense, represent an early foray into his subsequent broader craft of writing by omission. There are absences everywhere in these landscapes: remnants and fragments of human habitation, industry, and destruction populate the terrain of these early narratives. Think of the opening sentence of “The End of Something,”—an opening written in the quaint, almost archaic, style of someone about to tell a myth or legend: “In the old days,” Hemingway writes, “Hortons Bay was a lumbering town.”    Or think of Nick Adams at the opening of “Big Two-Hearted River,” seeking out familiar sites amidst the burned, blasted ruins of a place he knew intimately: “Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town…”  Or examine “The Three Day Blow,” where “the second-growth timber stands like a hedge against the woods behind,” a subtle yet pressing reminder of the logging industry’s presence in, and impact on, that place. We could also think of the logs that drift onto the lakeshore in “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife”; these logs are lost things themselves, “lost from the big log booms that were towed down the lake to the mill.” In short, Hemingway’s earliest textual geographies often set before readers a subtle, suggestive narrative of land and its history.  Understanding the cultural and ecological significance of objects on the land—and sensing the significance of the hidden narratives of the ruins and the remains of objects in place— becomes a necessary part of any literary interpretation of this writing. For Hemingway, both personally and artistically, the work of remembering what a place used to be is not always pleasant, but it is always necessary.

Earth Writing, Geography, and Memory, Continued.

Hilary Hawley
What Lies Beneath: The Making and Remaking of an Urban Waterway
Shelley McEuen
The Stories We Tell, The Landscapes We Deserve:
“Reading the Dynamics” of Rock Creek as Neglected Urban Wild Space
Audrey Cameron
​We Must Begin With These Stones
Jonathan Frey
Landscape with Strip Mall
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