Introduction: A Year-Long Study of Hemingway

For ten years, I’ve been haunted by the ghost of Ernest Hemingway. Not literally—I’ve never seen an apparition of the man (although Hemingway’s great-nephew lives nearby, and resembles his famous uncle closely). What I mean is that every where I turn are traces of Hemingway and the life he lived in Northern Michigan. I live in Petoskey, where Hemingway may have written some of his very worst work. He lived in this part of Michigan through many summers and for a year or so after he served in World War I, and he must be, along with the Civil War scholar Bruce Catton (now largely forgotten) and Sufjan Stevens, Petoskey’s two favorite native sons.

I certainly didn’t move to Petoskey because I wanted to study Hemingway. As an English major in college in the 1980s, I read my share of his works and decided forthwith that he was not for me. As a graduate student teaching American literature at The University of Texas at Austin, I once announced in class that between Faulkner and Hemingway, American literature just about imploded, destroying itself and anything in its path. It’s no surprise that I specialized in English literature, not American. My field of study is about as far as you can get from Hemingway: Victorian novels, particularly those written by women.

So, in a way, I’ve been avoiding Hemingway for most of my life. But I’ve learned that when you give up things to live in a small town—like good ethnic food, responsible local government, and low retail prices kept in line by healthy competition—you compensate by taking advantage of what’s around you. It’s for this reason that I grew to love Japanese food. For many years, the only decent ethnic restaurant (now closed, sadly) in Petoskey was Japanese. While I never really craved it when I lived in the metropolis (Indian and Thai food were more my style), I learned to appreciate it once I moved here. Likewise, I took up golf when I moved up north, as well as skiing and fishing: what’s the point of living in a resort town known for these activities if you don’t take advantage of them? It’s taken me a long time to see the connection, and I’ll admit I resisted it as long as I could, but I see now that I have to put Hemingway in the same category as golf, skiing, and Japanese food: if I’m going to live in Petoskey, I might as well delve in and do it right.

And that’s how I’ve come to make the decision to study Hemingway’s work in a systematic way over the next year, and to keep a record of my activities through this blog. I’m trained as a literary scholar and critic, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find something to say about Hemingway’s stories, essays, and novels. And it will be entertaining to find some of the places he mentions in his writing and visit them, imbibing the rarified, up-north air and using it to get into a real Hemingway mood. On the other hand, I’m fairly ignorant about Hemingway, so I will have to learn along the way, and, like any aspiring writer, I’ll have to conduct my education in public.

Here goes, then! I’m looking forward to this adventure, and I hope that along the way, I find some readers (and correspondents) to keep me company. Next post, I’ll discuss how I’m going to attack this project and find a way into Hemingway studies.