A Hemingway Encounter: A Few Words with Northern Michigan‘s Gift to the World

One of the pleasures of visiting Petoskey is taking a seat at the City Park Grill and imagining that it may be the very same one in which young Ernest Hemingway wrote some of the stories which led to his coronation as the Greatest Writer in the World.
Back then, this place was known as the Grill Cafè, not far from the boarding house where Hemingway lived when he was 20 in 1919. He was just back from World War I, recovering from leg wounds suffered during his stint as an ambulance driver on the Italian front.
“For Hemingway, the war was brief but brutal,“ writes H. Lea Lawrence in “A Hemingway Odyssey.“ “He arrived in Italy in late May, joined his ambulance unit on June 6, and was seriously wounded in both legs by a trench mortar on July 8. Although his time on the battlefield wasn‘t lengthy, his exceptional ability to remember everything he saw and heard and smelled and experienced supplied him with an enormous amount of information.“
While in Petoskey, limping around town on crutches, Hemingway made rough sketches of characters in the Nick Adams stories which appeared several years later in his first short story collection, “In Our Time.“ It‘s easy to imagine him scribbling at the bar of the Grill Cafè, which according to legend, had a tunnel downstairs leading to a brothel next door. Or typing up his soon-to-be-world-famous stories in a rented room.
Young Ernest had plenty of grist for his mill. In addition to his Italian experiences in the Great War which would one day lead to the novel, “A Farewell to Arms“ about lovers who escape the war only to endure a death in childbirth, he had collected many story ideas during family vacations on Walloon Lake going back for years. In fact, as far back as 1917, he wrote the following in his diary while hanging out in Horton Bay:

Good stuff for stories and essays
1 old couple at Boardman
2 Mancelona -- indian girl
3 Bear Creek
4 Rapid River
5 Mancelona, rainy night, tough looking lumberjack, young indian girl, kills self and girl

These notes would become the basis for stories such as “Up In Michigan,“ “Indian Camp“ and “The Battler,“ all of which you may have read in a high school or college literature course.
Petoskey is still very much Hemingway Country. At local bookstores in town, you can still find virtually everything Hemingway ever wrote just inside the doorway, along with dozens of biographies.
Author Lawrence tells us that Hemingway‘s stay in Petoskey as an aspiring writer was brief; although he left town with a bagful of stories in the making. During a talk about his gripping war experiences to the local Ladies Aid Society, Hemingway was offered the job of caring for the wounded son of Harriet Connable in Toronto. Petoskey was history -- within a week of arriving in the Canadian city, he sought a job with the “Toronto Star.“ That encounter would lead to his arrival in Paris in December, 1921 as the newspaper‘s first foreign correspondent -- an event which would launch Hemingway into orbit as one of the most famous and memorable characters of the 20th century.

***

In early April, I was fortunate to visit Paris, where Hemingway lived on the Left Bank of the Seine in a cold water dive with his new wife, Hadley Richardson, the first in a series of well-off women who would support his writing habit. His memoir, “A Moveable Feast,“ tells us the couple were stone-broke in Paris, but maintained a large cohort of pet cats who pooped behind the bathtub, as well as a growing collection of artist and literary rebels for friends. Pals included the likes of James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Here, along the Boulevard St. Germain, you can still visit his old haunts which were bohemian dumps back then, but are now gilded with literary glory at nose-bleed prices along the lines of $10 a beer -- cafès such as the Lilas de Closerie where you can take a seat where “Papa“ scribbled -- just like at the City Park Grill in Petoskey -- and stalk Hemingway‘s legacy.
In the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore, just off Boulevard St. Michelle, a stone‘s throw from Notre Dame, I was reminded that Paris is also very much Hemingway Country. As in Petoskey, books by and about Hemingway litter the entryway to what is one of the most famous bookstores in the world (largely because of its ties to you-know-who). I bought a copy of “Hemingway -- the 1930s“ by Michael Reynolds, expensive at 17 Euros, but embossed with the bookstore‘s imprimateur as a nice souvenir.
Gazing at the ramshackle, tottering shelves, it occured to me that Hemingway had probably stood at the very same spot, picking out books by Jack London, Mark Twain, Rimbaud, Proust or Flaubert. The very same spot.
Here in Paris, young Ernest labored for free on the poet Ezra Pound‘s literary magazine in between “Toronto Star“ dispatches, his only payment being the publication of his own stories and poems.

***

It‘s an age-old story -- a young genius gives his gifts and insights away freely and heaven‘s angels deliver boxcars of gold in return. Bob Dylan, for instance, playing open mics in Greenwich Village in 1961, or Vincent Van Gogh slaving over his paintings for his whole mad life and selling only one. So it was with young Ernest Hemingway -- simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time with a message that rings in people‘s hearts -- what is called the zeitgeist or the spirit of the times.
People like Hemingway capture the zeitgeist and find the nexus of spirit, geography, charisma and message to become the avatars of art. Jim Morrison‘s mojo rising in Venice, California in 1966; the Beatles in Hamburg, Germany in 1962; Van Gogh‘s discovery of the fire residing in sunfires in the south of France; Kurt Cobain reinventing rock in Seattle, 1990. No one knows where the nexus of fame and artistry will surface next -- like the goddess Aphrodite, it bursts from the waves of what‘s happening and caresses the brow of some golden child passing through.
And so it was for Ernest Hemingway, whose rough tales of the unwashed, uncouth denizens of Northern Michigan electrified the literary and art crowd of Paris in the early 1920s.
Hemingway wrote of jacknife C-sections, stitched with fishing line at an Indian camp outside Petoskey. he wrote of a punchdrunk fighter and his negro guardian, threatening young Nick Adams who‘d been thrown from a train by a railroad bull outside Mancelona. A young woman has sex with Nick on a dock and demonstrates a careless love ‘em and leave ‘em attitude that is startlingly modern. Quelle scandal! For Europeans recovering from the ripsaw horror of World War I where 10 million men died -- sometimes in trench battles of poison gas and machine gun fire that consumed 600,000 lives -- such envigorating tales of a faraway, rugged frontier were the perfect tonic for recovery.

***

Standing at the bookstore in Paris, a shade slipped by the window and I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck. In the maze of books, I noticed -- felt really -- that someone was standing there in the dim, mouldering paper stink of Shakespeare & Company.
“Who are you?“ I demanded.
“What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know,“ the shape replied. “A writer should know too much.“ 1
What the hell?
“That sounds like a Northern Michigan accent, mister, channeled by way of Paris, Switzerland, Spain, Africa, Key West, Cuba and Idaho,“ I replied.
“The bull could not make up his mind to charge,“ he said cryptically. 2
It sounded like an invitation to talk. I tested the shade with a question about Northern Michigan.
“Have you ever been to Horton Bay by any chance?“ I asked.
“A steep sandy road ran down the hill to the bay through the timber,“ he answered. “From Smith‘s back door you could look out across the woods that ran down to the lake and across the bay. It was very beautiful in the spring and summer, the bay blue and bright and usually whitecaps on the lake out beyond the point from the breeze blowing from Charlevoix and Lake Michigan.“ 3
Obviously, he knew the place.
“They say you did quite a lot of trout fishing while you lived there,“ I said.
“I‘ve never taken one under three pounds out of the Bay and they run as high as fifteen,“ he answered. “The biggest I ever took was nine and seven ounces. And you always get a strike. A night‘s fishing would average three of the big trout.“ 4
“I thought you were dead,“ I said.
“When I die, it will be from writing checks,“ he replied. 5
“What‘s it like where you‘re at now?“
“This is not a good place to stop,“ he answered. “If you can make it, there are trucks up the road where it forks for Tortosa.“ 6
“Is that near Barcelona?“
“I know no one in that direction,“ he said. “But thank you very much. That you again very much.“ 6
“Are you happy where you‘re at?“ I asked, trying a different tack.
“I have never heard a happy life defined,“ the shade answered. “I have always been happy when I am working. If I cannot work I usually do something bad and have remorse and then my conscience makes me work. A conscience tells truths that are as uncomfortable as those a compass sometimes shows. Personally I am happy when I work hard and love someone. Since I have done both these things now for a long time I would say I have a happy life.
“Times have always been bad,“ he went on. “But Walter Raleigh wrote very well the night before he climbed the stairs to the scaffold erected in the Old Palace yard of Westminster. I see no reason now not to write well because the times are bad both for those who write and those who read.“ 7
“So, where are you headed now?“
“Off to the Floridita.“ 8
It was Hemingway‘s favorite bar in Havana, Cuba, proof positive, I guess, that Papa Hemingway had really lingered with me amid the bookshelves of his old haunt in Paris. Some say that Hemingway blew his brains out with a shotgun at his ranch in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961, dissipated as a drunk who‘d lost the ability to write. But those who know his work are well aware that the suicide never happened -- Ernest Hemingway lives on in Petoskey, Paris, Spain, Cuba, Key West... he‘s not that hard to find.
Had the shade of Ernest Hemingway actually whispered to me, or was it simply the rustling of his books, stitching the world like a tin-can telephone of the spirits ranging from Petoskey to Paris with an operater-assisted break-in call?
Well, that I do not know. Nor do I know whether any Parisian bookworms ever arrived agog on the shores of Petoskey, Michigan to sit in Hemingway‘s old barstool in the same sort of pilgrimage that inspired me to seek him out in Paris.
But I do know one thing. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. 9

FOOTNOTES:
1. Hemingway‘s letter to his friend Bernard Berenson on the meaning of “The Old Man and the Sea,“ 1952.
2. From a vignette in Chapter X of “In Our Times.“
3. From the short story, “Up in Michigan.“
4. Letter to a friend, Jim Gable.
5. From an article in the Kansas City Star by Ben Meyer, 1950.
6. From the short story, “Old Man at the Bridge.“
6. Also from “Old Man at the Bridge.“
7. A “Talk with Ernest Hemingway“ by Harvey Breit, New York Times Book Review, 1952.
8. From “Hemingway in Cuba,“ an article in the Atlantic Monthly by Robert Manning, 1965.
9. “For Whom the Bell Tolls.“ View On Our Website