- The Snows
of Disbelief
- by William Elliott Hazelgrove
You assume people
know who Ernest Hemingway is."Wasn't he that writer guy?"
A biography comes on television and he pops up in old films of
movie stars or on a safari, but that time is past--almost seventy
years past and the century is almost gone. It's become passé
to be a Hemingway fan. The biggest of the Dead White Male writers;
a big man stomping around shooting bears and catching swordfish
off the coast of Florida. Even his character has become old fashioned.
I mean, really, the man of adventure, the swashbuckler of letters--in
the twentieth century? I don't think so. Maybe Indiana Jones
or Bob Fossett trying to fly around the world in his balloon,
but a real man of action--it must have been a movie character.
So, you clear all that away and all we are left with is his writing.
But even that gets tangled up in the current climate of "oh
come on...tell us what really happened!" Fiction itself
is now subjected to the same standards as nonfiction. Suspension
of belief sounds good, but it really doesn't occur. How does
fiction compare to reality is the new standard. Dare to put some
poetry in there and people become venomous. So what is the reality
of Ernest Hemingway's fiction? What is left that we can say,
yes, this actually happened--or is it all just mannered, quaint,
stories of the early century.
I had an odd task recently. I was asked by the Ernest Hemingway
Foundation to go get his bed up in Michigan. The 
bed
was in the possession of a nephew in the town of Petosky. This
is the site of the Hemingway cottage on Walloon lake and the
setting of many of his short stories; Big Two Hearted River,
Up In Michigan, Indian Camp, Three Day Blow to name a few. Hemingway
spent his summers up there, hunting ,fishing, camping and gathering
fodder. I chose the weekend of the New Year to go.
Petosky was snow covered when I arrived. I drove down the winding
road leading back to the Hemingway cottage. There were million
dollar homes on the road now. I found out Petosky is a very hot
vacation spot. I reached his nephews residence and picked up
the bed and a few old chairs. The bed was a youth bed, one Ernest
was said to have slept in. But there was nothing extraordinary,
no markings of genius. Just wood painted a faded white with a
rusty mattress spring. I then drove back down the road to the
Hemingway cottage. The cottage is long and white with aluminum
siding. Not very rustic. Not Hemingway at all. I plowed around
in the snow that was up to my thighs, looking around the porch
and glancing into some of the windows. Inside it looked like
a cottage, wood floors and walls. A fireplace.
I looked out to Walloon lake frozen and silent. The few flakes
turned heavy just then and the dark clouds overhead seemed to
break open. A wind came down and in minutes the air was rent
with snow. I struggled back to my car and could hear the whistling
of the storm. It was ferocious. I could not see and I turned
at the car door. It was a blizzard. The cottage was no longer
visible. I had never seen a storm like this before. Storms came
up and you went inside, but I couldn't see my hand in front of
my face.
The car wheels spun as I tried to get out of the snow. I kept
thinking the storm would pass. I got back out of the car and
started down the road, thinking I would see someone who could
help me out. That's when it happened. I felt him walking through
the snow. The wind roared through the trees and I thought of
A Three Day Blow, then the road of pines the girl and the man
walked down in Up In Michigan. I trudged on thinking of the lone
camper in Big Two Hearted River and how he saw no one for days
and the utter loneliness of the landscape. There were no houses
anymore, just snow and the forest and I wondered if I might be
in danger. I turned back with the panicked, quick feeling inside
and returned to the car.
I sat and waited. It was all I could do. The snow slowly covered
the car and I sat with Ernest Hemingway's bed on the side of
a road he had walked as a boy. That weekend the worst blizzard
in twenty years hit the Midwest. Fifteen people died and there
was a hundred car pile up on the expressway. Indiana was declared
a disaster area and Chicago nearly had to shut down. It took
me two days to get home.
I dropped off the bed at his birthplace in Oak Park and it
was then I realized who was fooling who. In the darkness of the
parlor of his home, with the storm still raging outside, I realized
he wrote of the world as he saw it-as it still is-- uncertain,
dangerous, requiring courage along the lines of an adventurer
to face it. We sit in our smug reality of bits and bytes, thinking
we know the world, we know reality.
Maybe we are the ones living in fiction now.
