The collection The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway chart the life of Nick from childhood through adolescence, early adulthood, through war and peace and marriage, and finally, fatherhood.  I’d read a few of the stories before in separate collections but to read the stories set in chronological order was really wonderful.  After reading the last story, in which Nick is riding with his son and reminiscing with his father, I turned back to the first few stories with Nick and his father, and the whole cycle really connected, made sense, and was very beautiful. I could see the influence of father on son, as well as the lasting impact of place on Nick, and the continuation of that influence and that memory of place on the next generation.

What is so wonderful about Hemingway is how he never tells his readers how to feel (there is zero manipulation), but instead uses his very clear, declarative sentences to recreate for us the place, the atmosphere, the characters, and from all that we extrapolate our own experience and reactions.  I especially love his nature scenes, the soft, fragrant bed of needles under towering hemlock trees, the rabbit dancing through the sunlit path, the brightness of lake water under moonlight, and the plunge down through the warm water of a lake into the colder water below and the galvanizing taste of fresh water, so much better cleaner and more refreshing than the ocean.  I live near the ocean now and I still dream of lake swimming: through Hemingway, I experienced it again.

What I also love about Hemingway is how although his men are hunters and fishermen (I can be spared those details), they are nevertheless frightened of death: the theme of fearing death, of seeking to absolve oneself from its necessity by living a certain way, works throughout all the stories and all the ages of Nick Adams.  Yet even in seeking absolution, there is understanding that no escape is possible.  The scene where the Swede Ole Anderson is just waiting on his bed, fully clothed, for his assassins to find him, is so chilling not only for the old Swede but also for us readers: death will find us too, whether we wait in our rooms or venture out.  If the world to be ventured into is the great sweeping forests and meadows of the Great Lakes region, the answer is easy: tramp through the forest, lay in the meadow, cool your feet in the stream.

War is portrayed in these stories not in the battles but in the waiting for it (“Night Before Landing”) and in the aftermath: waiting wounded on a street for the stretchers to sweep forward and rehab in the hospital, where the injuries of a fellow patient are due not to battle but to loss: a man who has lost his wife to pneumonia explains,  “It is very difficult, I cannot resign myself….I am utterly unable to resign myself.“  I cried reading those words, and reading of the man’s own tears running down his cheeks.

Love and romance are never pretty in Hemingway, but always genuine, stripped-down, and powerful: Nick’s first heartbreak, the first sexual experiences (“She did first what no one has ever done better“), the easy love with Kate of “The Summer People”, and the break-ups  (“The Three-Day Blow”).

The story “On Writing” is an homage to summer as it should be:  “All the love went into fishing and the summer.  He had loved it more than anything…the long trips in the car, fishing in the bay, reading in the hammock on hot days, swimming off the dock, playing baseball….eating in the dining room looking out the window across the long fields and the point to the lake, talking… drinking…the fishing trips away from the farm, just lying around.”

“On Writing” is also a primer on writing creatively, on using real life to create imagined scenes of beauty, loss, longing, and hope that death will never come: a primer on how to write like Hemingway.  But of course, no one can write like Hemingway.  He is able to combine the mental experience of reading together with a physical involvement with scene and character.  The entire package is lovely, stirring, and so real that it is as if Hemingway is recreating a memory of my own, something I’ve already experienced, if not in this life, then in another one.  Life triumphant over death: these stories are alive, the words breathing and the lines beating, and the people and places as real as today’s sunlight outside my window.