THE STORM IS BREWING

Congratulations on your graduation from high school, Ernest! I see the that your summer following graduation (in 1917) has been filled with work on the farm. (Longfield Farm was a 40-acre property across Walloon Lake from Windemere - the Hemingway summer house. Longfield was purchased by the Hemingways, and as a teenager Ernest worked on the farm during summer holidays and frequently camped out there by himself and with friends.)

Good for you for taking full advantage of the opportunity to enjoy your summer hunting, fishing, and working on the farm - all activities that you love. Congratulations also on getting a job with the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. It's great that you were able to connect with one of your summer buddies, Carl Edgar, to room together in Kansas City. What a break! And what a great way to ease into the pace of city life and a full time job. Don't forget to thank your Uncle Tyler for helping you get the position. Jobs aren't always easy to come by and you pretty much fell into this one!

Like many young men of the period, you're getting your first taste of life at a boarding house. Carl Edgar, your roommate, sounds pretty interesting. Besides being a summertime buddy of yours, you describe him as a 28 year old manager of the California Oil Burner Company. I'm thinking he might possess the know-how and savvy of someone older and perhaps wiser and might be able to help you as you adjust to your new life in the "big city."

In your letter (dated October, 1917) to your sister, Marcelline, you share that, "Carl Edgar and I jazz forth with Frequency...In truth it is the life at this place." It seems that your life has picked up speed and is "full steam ahead." In a letter dated November 1917 you share with your siblings that you have joined the Missouri Home Guard. Little do you know how quickly things will accelerate from this point. Being a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star carries no foreboding of being in the thick of war and at the front in Italy within a year. You, Ernest, who feel the pull of war calling you, "I intend to enlist in the Canadian Army soon but may wait till spring brings back Blue days and Fair. Honest kid I can't stay out much longer."

You, Ernest, the 17 year old man-child who romanticizes the Canadian forces, "They are the greatest fighters in the world...I may even wait until the summer is over but believe me I will go not because of any love of gold braid glory etc. but because I couldn't face anybody after the war and not have been in it."  Ernest, my heart aches for you and what you don't know. Your naive exuberance will be crushed on the killing fields of Italy. You will carry both psychological and physical wounds with you, from what is coming, for the rest of your life. No young man should know what you will learn. 

Setting that aside, it's obvious from your letters that you're really enjoying digging into the politics and public life in Kansas City and scribing about people and events.It sounds like there's plenty of craziness in the news room, with lots of young guys milling about trying to make a mark for themselves. You're in the thick of it alright - just where you like to be.

BIGGER THAN LIFE

Ernest Hemingway at Walloon Lake

Ernest, let's suppose we have the ability to sit together and talk for awhile about how you see the world. It's 1915/1916 and you're 17 years old. There is war brewing a world away that you have no knowledge of how you're going to be involved and how it will change your life. But let's set that aside. Lets sit by the shore of Walloon Lake for a spell, and watch the water bugs scuttle across the surface and talk about you, who you are, what you love and are passionate about, and how you see your future. I know, as a young, active, somewhat self absorbed adolescent, who sees adults as affected and boring, and who'd rather be fishing and mucking about with his friends, sitting and talking like this is probably the last thing you would want to do.

Tell you what, let's drop a line in the water and see what we catch.

From your letter written in the spring of 1916 I gleaned that you and a group of friends were planning a "Hudson Bay Trip." What fun! Your plan is to take two canoes and start at the Soo Locks, near Sault St. Marie, and take the Moose River to Hudson Bay. Ernest, I love your adventurous nature. You are a romantic at heart. I can read it in your letters and in the pictures that you paint around the events in your life. You have a way of making each vignette larger than life. I know the trip never came to fruition, but the thought of it, the planning of it, the fun of it!

Yes, life for you at this age is like an adventure and the young men you run with make up a sort of "secret society": you invent words and languages, and playfully assign monikers. You tease and provoke and playfully prod. I'm not surprised that in your letter to Emily Goetzman, dated March, 1916, you write of you father "frowning on boxing" due to a boxing match you helped stage/participated in at your house which resulted in a bloody nose on your part. All in fun, as you point out, but not to be repeated according to your father. I enjoyed the way you framed his resulting diatribe on boxing: "Did dad break up that little social tea? Wow. Talk about the IV Phillipic. Dad certainly rose to the occasion in oratory line." Love it! I must say, succinctly put.

What I read in your letters to your family and friends is that there's lore to be created and passed on in the telling of your life stories. There's giant rainbow trout to catch after battling for hours; there's fields of hay to be mowed and bailed and commiserated over; there's orchards to be harvested and potatoes to be dug and it's all a great adventure. You wrote in a letter to your sister, Marcelline (who you fondly call Ivory), dated June 20, 1916, "Ivory, dearest, you should have seen the old brute doing a war dance in the costume of Adam enveloped by a cloud of mosquitoes on top of a bluff about 300 feet high at night while my clothes were drying on a rack of cedar poles in the driving rain. One hand waved a shoe aloft the other helped me swear. The calm and quiet of the abysmal wilderness of the Boardman River were violated by the old Brute."

At the young age of 17, Ernest, you were already bigger than life.

A CHILDHOOD OF DELIGHT

Growing up a young man in the early 1900s - what an interesting time. The young people of today bemoan not having the latest iPhone or not being able to have more "game time" or "internet time". Ernest, I love that your sad lament on September 8th, 1914 was for long pants, "May I please have some long pants. Every other Boy in our class has them..." I suppose there's probably little difference between that and today's youth lamenting not having the latest whatever. For you having long pants was a right of passage to the beginning of adulthood. 

Don't be so eager to grow up too fast, Ernest. Adulting can be challenging. That lovely soul that you have, that tender heart that uses delightful terms of endearment for those you love, and that creative mind that devises witty monikers for signing off your letters will take some major hits as you grow to adulthood. 

The summer that you wrote your plea for long pants, your mother, Grace, wrote, "Ernest grew an inch a month this summer and became very strong and capable on the farm... He outgrew all his clothes." 

The stories you share in your letters of hunting, fishing, and adventuring in the woods and fields speak to a summer full of the out-of-doors. You are brimming with fun, and delight in teasing everyone and anyone who you can wrap your words around. Ernest, you are brave, and insightful. You play with words like you play with the stories you wrap around the life that is coming at you. Your unbridled creativeness exceeds the bounds of reality at times. Those who don't get you sometimes are critical of your creative flare for interpretation. 

Despite the critics you meet the world with an affable nature that tends to smooth the feathers you ruffle along the way. Your ability to weave a story and write a good yarn is already winning hearts and causing those around you to lean in, in order to see the world through your eyes.

Ernest, I appreciate your good naturedness. You have the capacity to lift people's spirits and capture their attention and engagement. It is obvious, from what others say about you and how they are drawn to you, that you are fun to be around. I wish we could have known each other as children.

WE DON'T KNOW WHAT WE DON'T KNOW

Ernest Hemingway fishing in Horton's Creek

Dearest eight year old Ernest, let's sit a spell and talk about you, your childhood and the thoughts we have around "what is right" in the world and who we are. As I read your letters I am struck with the tone and tenor of your words. I see that even at the young age of eight, you often choose your words carefully and strike-through words or phrases as you paint the picture that your words reveal.

I see fishing and the out-of-doors as your great escape and opportunity to just be uncomplicatedly you. We all need those safety zones where we can let down our guard and simply be - whoever we are in that moment and however we feel. It seems, from my perspective, that when you spend a great deal of time in your head, when you're creative, and plugged into a life of full immersion, some of the loveliest times are when you step away and let nature take hold of your soul and you choose to rest at the end of a line, dangling in the water - the world be what it may.

Life and the human existence is the grand illusion, isn't it? It can be so impelling, even at the age of eight, as social pressures swirl about, and political currents sweep and eddy. We care, and we love, and we support as best we can at eight years old. Those adults who think we are to be seen and not heard have no idea what we see and hear and are impacted by. Those adults who direct and control don't see how hard we work to interpret things from the limited perspective of a child, and how we try, in our own way, to make an offering to life, to family, to community.

As you sit with your line in the water, peaceful, just being, do you ever wonder why all of that stuff of human existence isn't as simple and uncomplicated? No... that kind of thought we'll leave to the adults. Who wants to drag that into such a sublime moment? It's crazy! It's much more fun to sit and watch the water bugs scuttle across the surface of the lake. It's fun to watch the occasional bubbles perk up from below to the surface... maybe a snapping turtle lies below, or an eel, or that next fish you might catch. That's the stuff of this moment.

It's magical to admire the lacy wings of the dragonfly as it alights on the end of your pole, its lovely purple and green body flashing in the sunlight. It's fun to "riddit" back to the bull frogs hidden among the lily pads, and watch the spider build its lacy web among the reeds swaying gently in the summer breeze. Yes, Ernest, we are so fortunate to have this time, this childhood, these memories. We don't know what we don't know.

SUMMER IN NANTUCKET

(Grace Hall Hemingway and Ernest leaving for Nantucket, August 1910)

Dear Ernest,

What wonderful summers you have! Tell me more about clamming in the river. It sounds positively muddy and fun! I love that you brought a clam back to your classroom and put it in the fish tank where it promptly clamped down on the tail of that poor unsuspecting fantail gold fish - that must have put quite a scare into that poor fish! Never mind how riotous it must have been as it clunked and thunked, dragging that clam in a panic around the tank. It's a wonder the class was able to get any work done at all that day with all that excitement.

Nantucket sounds marvelous. I'm not surprised you're fishing up a storm and catching everything in sight. Those rod and reel skills you perfected in Michigan are coming in handy fishing the Nantucket Sound. For myself it was sailing that won my heart. Summers were filled with racing and just sailing the islands, putting ashore at the likes of Cuttyhunk and Nashawena where we'd chase the wild sheep and sunbath on the beach. How I LOVED the Edgartown race weekend where we'd participate in the Round the Island Race: Every year in July, Edgartown Yacht Club makes its own unique contribution to the maritime traditions of Martha’s Vineyard by perpetuating its historic ’Round-the-Island Race (’RTI) that has been repeated annually since 1938.

Ernest, it's too bad you didn't experience the thrill, yourself, of the excitement and competition of the Round the Island Race. You would have loved it! It's a spectacular sailing race that equals any roller coaster, when there's a stiff wind. Many is the time we'd be healing so far over that water was pouring in over the gunnels and we'd be scrambling into the harnesses and hanging out over the side, serving as live ballast as we laughed and shouted and maneuvered the channels around the islands. What fun!

It's wonderful that you had the opportunity to go sailing to Great Point. Yes, that open water can be rough and I love that you took to the open ocean and "shipped water grandly." It is so much fun to feel the power of the wind in the sail as the hull of your boat slaps along in the waves and the sail beats madly as you tack your way along the island shore to the point light house. How marvelous that you were exactly were the Atlantic ocean meets the Nantucket Sound. That water has the capacity to really toss you around, with the tides and the wind working it into a rare state of agitation. Good for you for taking on the challenge so splendidly!

I love your description of the large sword fish sword that you acquired from "an old salt." They are the best kind of artifacts, as their provenience has the opportunity to becomes richer and more embellished with time. 

Thank you for taking the time to go with your mother to her suffrage meeting. The women's right to vote, and to own property, was to continue to be a point of contention for quite some time. Women need the support of good men, even young men like yourself. 

Please do get out there to the sea and catch a few sea trout. There's nothing like a "gamy" fish to put up a fight and make you feel like you earned your dinner.

Hugs to you and Mother Hemingway,
Betsy McDowell

LET THE RUMPUS BEGIN

Dear Ernest, I am pleased to share with you that I now have all three volumes of your letters to read. Wouldn't you know it, the last volume would arrive first; so I did take a quick read into it while waiting for the other two volumes to arrive, but now that I have all three, I have made myself set aside the last volume to start from the beginning.

I love the child that you are as this journey begins. How wonderful! What a treat to be able to peak into this childhood window. Ernest, you are so bright, and funny, and boyish. These first letters of yours date from the early 1900s. Volume 1 of your letters spans the time period from 1907 to 1922. Which would have covered that part of your life from the age of 8 to age 23.

Although what has been preserved is a mere fragment of the letters you were to write in your lifetime, still, it seems too good to be true to be able to have the opportunity to glimpse into your life, thoughts, and adventures.

First, young Ernest, let me send you a big hug and say that I can fully commiserate on the delights of summers spent adventuring on a rural lake - you on Walloon Lake, in Michigan, I on West Hill Lake, outside of New Haven, Connecticut. The freedom of exploring the fields and woods. The joy of waking up to the surface of the lake sparkling as if it had been sewn with millions of diamonds just for our delight. You write of seeing a mother duck and her seven little babies. For myself, I remember the earthy smell of decaying leaves as my brothers and I hunted salamanders - orange and black spotted newts with bright black eyes and tiny translucent toes. What fun!

We were so blessed that we didn't know then, dear friend, about what life held for us. Thank God! Right? How could we ever have been able to have so much unbridled fun, pleasure, and enjoyment with such simple things that seemed so miraculous and special. 

I am sorry that the squabs died. I can remember finding young birds, fallen from their nests, and repeatedly trying to nurse them, only to have them die in my care. There were so many, that my brother's and I established a small cemetery for the express purpose of giving these poor souls a resting place. Ernest, you would have loved the pomp and circumstance of our funerals as we held the processional down the shaded path, stopping just next to the garage, where we interred the remains and said a few memorable words over the bodies. It really helped that the boys were acolytes at church as they had just the right thing to say to invoke God to sit up and pay attention.

Dinner with grandpa; mucking about in the river; fishing - the stuff of summer. Perhaps your parents would, like mine, come to see you during those summers. I'm sure, like me you'd be brimming with stories of adventure and discovery, shadowing their every step as they took up temporary residence in the summer house. Perhaps you, like me, knew that you had a finite window of time to invoke your rights to their attentions and time before they left again. I wonder, Ernest, if you ever felt, like I did, that you really had their full attention? Or did it feel like somehow the world of adults forever prevented them from connecting to the miracle of what you laid at their feet as a child? 

What fun that you were able to help your father in getting his closet in order. Good for you! I'm sure he thought you were the best thing since sliced bread! I love that your Mom is sending you stamps from her travels, and how exciting that you were able to go on the roller coaster! You are so much braver than I, Ernest. I can't stomach roller coasters, not at all. In all honesty, I get motion sickness from a swing, can you imagine how sick I would get on a roller coaster!?!  

I will leave you for now, but I am looking forward to learning more about your trip to Nantucket with your mother, and the time you spent there. Nantucket holds many childhood memories for me, growing up in that area. We can compare notes!

Sending you one more hug before signing off.

With deep affection,
Betsy McDowell

SUNDAY POETRY

3 Short Stories and 10 Poems was published in 1923. "The print run numbered only '300 copies, put out by friend and fellow expatriate, the writer- publisher Robert McAlmon,' writes Steve King at Today in Literature. 'Both had arrived in Paris in 1921, Hemingway an unpublished twenty-two-year-old journalist with a recent bride, a handful of letters of introduction provided by Sherwood Anderson, and a clear imperative: ‘All you have to do is write one true sentence.'"

CHAPTER HEADING
For we have thought the longer thoughts
And gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devils' tunes,
Shivering home to pray;
To serve one master in the night,
Another in the day.

My collection of my personal poetry over the years is unpublished. As I read about the "drive to be heard" the "imperative to be published," that hasn't been a incentive for me. I am sharing this now, just to share it, and have no thoughts about it being anything other than something that I wrote a long time ago that resonated at that time and that, for whatever reason, was something that I hung on to until now.

BEING WITH YOU

Fortunate am I

Who you allow to share,

On occasion,

Those thoughts of yours.

Thoughts

That foliate your inner solitude,

So lush

That it overflows into your outer existence.

Tender tendrils

That lead me to speculate as to

The wonder

Of your private mind's jungle.

What tiger's thoughts

Stalk unsuspecting dreams?

A jungle dense

With the vine of hope.

And soft is the ground,

As quietly I pass.

Treading carefully

On thoughts of the past.

Not wanting to disturb

The natural processes

Of you.

Other's high rises

Don't belong

Neither imposed order,

Nor forced controls

For it is you

Who are a blessing to your friends

When you share with them

The living growing environment

Of yourself.

Betsy McDowell. Poem written to a friend in 1977 while working at MIT.

In his poem CHAPTER HEADING Hemingway writes of the double standard of pios inclinations brought down by "earthly vices." Hindsight has me better understanding the internal conflicts that are a part of the human condition. 

When he writes, "For we have thought the longer thoughts and gone the shorter way," I can think of times in my life when I have done just that. The redemptive opportunity in this sense of falling short lies in being able to reflect on behaviors and outcomes and to learn, act, and adjust on an ongoing basis. There is as much opportunity in our failings to live up to our own expectations, as well as continuously raise the bar, as there is in our successes and accomplishments.

My poem was written around 1977 when I was working at MIT for Professor Michael Feld, in Laser Optics and Spectroscopy. That was an amazing time in my life where the world was my oyster. I found myself constantly in a state of amazement and wonder as life poured itself out to me and threw open doors and windows, sometimes breaching the ramparts themselves.

HOW DO YOU LOVE SOMEONE WHO FEELS UNLOVABLE?

As I read the comments about Torrents of Spring posted out on GoodReads, I was struck by the thought that hindsight is 20/20, and that, "Sometimes life as you're living it has you by the throat, or is making you feel like you can truly fly; and the act of a life lived in full immersion doesn't necessarily promote the art of 20/20 introspection." 

I am going to share with you something that a leader of mine once shared. He was talking about his wife and how sometimes he felt challenged to be a helping partner in fostering a thriving marriage environment. He shared that, simply, "Sometimes you just have to love them."

Ernest, when I read Torrents of Spring (and I now know that you wrote it in order to get out of a contract you didn't want to be in and away from a life you didn't want) my heart breaks for you as you set into motion, without the benefit of hindsight, a pattern of behavior that will spin tighter and tighter throughout your life until it culminates in your death.

Let's talk about the contract and your wish to get out of it. What led you to the path you chose? You, who have the capacity to bend and break hearts and minds with your words; you, a virtuoso in writing stories that echo the music of the human condition - you cut, and slashed, and mutilated your art in Torrents of Spring. What was left was a Quasimodo work of literature, that dragged it's deformed sentences, and mishappened framework over the shards of glass and razor wire of broken thought processes and flawed reasoning to arrive at a naked conclusion of insanely diminished outcomes. It had to have been painful to write.

What prompted such potentially self destructive behavior? You were 27 years old. Your literary career was just getting started. To have taken such an, "in your face" stance was risky.

Yes, you were back from a war that forever changed you. You had just lost a love that you, like your character in Torrents of Spring, may have anguished over how to hold onto, "She had felt lately that she couldn’t hold him. In the nights, now, when she touched Scripps he rolled away, not toward her. It was a little sign, but life was made up of little signs. She felt she couldn’t hold him." You too must have felt that you couldn't hold the love you lost.

In your effort to escape a reality that you didn't want, your choice of behavior was to insult your mentor and deride his school of writing while mocking it's established membership and following. Your choice of behavior was to write a piece of work that like the Durian Fruit stunk so badly, and prickled so sharply, that only those who were truly accepting of all of its nastiness could ever get past those barriers to be able to appreciate what you created.

Ernest, you yourself pointed out that, "life was made up of little signs." At 27, when you have experienced so much, and been hurt so badly, it's easy to be reactive. Striking out, hurting others, leaving those who fail to meet your expectations, that's instinctual knee-jerk behavior; that's the base behavior of a wounded animal. In all honesty, I've been there myself, I've behaved that way myself. However, it is the times where you have the capacity to step back and think about your choices, to deduce more constructive behaviors and to make other choices going forward that are different, that have the capacity to put you on an other than self destructive course.

That being said, there are those of us who never seem to be able to escape the black hole that the vortex of repeatedly destructive behaviors can draw us into. Sometimes, as my leader said, "Sometimes you just have to love them."

AN INTRODUCTION TO COMPLEXITY

WOW! OK Ernest, you have my attention. Torrents of Spring is complex. If I were sitting across the table from you, let’s just say I got up and moved my chair next to yours and angled it towards you so that I can better connect. I will be honest with you in that I find your visuals both engaging and disturbing.

I know that by the time you wrote this story you had served as an ambulance driver in Italy and had been wounded. That you had seen far more than a young man should ever see in terms of devastation, death, and destruction and that you had been jilted and “thrown over” by a woman you loved and that you were to carry these wounds with you your entire life.

We do share a lot in common when it comes to how we were raised and the homes we grew up in. Like you, both my parents were well educated and provided a “well healed” life with numerous benefits. I do believe that we both arrived at similar conclusions about that life style and the limitations it presented, and we both chose to move away from it, each in our own way, and build a different kind of life for ourselves. You were forced to take up the cello; I to spend hours at the piano keyboard running scales and bemoaning my fate. Neither of us were the musicians our musical parents might have wanted us to be. In the end, their vision was not ours, and to their disappointment, our drummers were beating a cadence we could not resist.

So let me step back to when I was 27 – the age you were when Torrents of Spring was published. You went to Paris, I to Nevada. We both were on a sort of “wing and a prayer” as we chose to get away from the confines of the lives that had been chosen for us. I swear my parents were hoping I’d call in defeat and return to the life they had raised me for. I too lost the “love of my life,” though I chose to break it off. I recognized in myself that I would make a less than desirable partner in a marriage, and that life held something else for me. I too carried the impact of that choice throughout my life. I have come to terms with it and have built a life of meaning around the wound, but it is still there. Like a long suffered scar it pulls at me at times, causing discomfort and pain, but I am used to it.

I see, Ernest, that you lean heavily on Henry Fielding in this short story, “known for his rich, earthy humor and satirical prowess.” Satire is the stuff of stand-up comedy in today’s world. Torrents of Spring is certainly rife with satire. Ernest, we don’t know each other well yet. Our summer together is just starting, but I have to wonder if your satire isn’t a mask for your woundedness? Don’t worry, I’m not asking expecting you to respond, but simply putting it out there as a possibility – a theory, of sorts, that I will return to throughout the summer with the hopes of proving or disproving.

I can’t relate, personally, to all of the experiences you had that lead up to the writing of Torrents of Spring. War is a uniquely life changing experience. I thank God that I have not known war personally. That being said, I am not impervious to the suffering that is a part of the information flow coming out of war zones and refugee camps, but those of us who are so removed show true lack of understanding when we attempt to commiserate with those who have walked the walk. Let me say that I bow to your truth regarding war, I thank you for your service, and I allow you the space and grace to own your path that is the result of this experience.

So I will close this post with a note on writing structure, as that was a key theme of Torrents of Spring. This was evident to me because in several places in the story you break with the storyline to speak to the reader directly. Some of what you speak to is writing structure, like that of music, that makes up the bones of the story: where the elements are introduced, they engage to produce key structural patterns, they break away to get lost in the complexity of the elements, and then they come back together to a definite crescendo and fade. But even this, dear Ernest (and I use that term with the deepest kindness in my heart), you satirically point out as contrived, affected, and somehow flawed. In this satirical context I see that you mock life itself – it’s rhythms, it’s seasons, its struggles and rewards. My own caution to myself when I venture in this direction is: However much you protest the wind, it will still blow.

Satire as a coping mechanism is useful. It is an island in a life of immersion. It’s one of those islands of the mind that allow you to drag yourself out of the mire of humanity, even if just for a while, and look at life as something other than yourself. I have experienced a number of people in my life who were successful satirically and still able to lead lives of immersion – it was only a small part of their larger story. I have also known a larger body of people for whom satire became their excuse for “failure to engage”. It became their personal differentiator between the “us” and “them” dichotomy that they came to accept as the truth of their lives. As I read Torrents of Spring I bow to your satirical skill and prowess at weaving a bizarre and often times touching and disturbing story, but offer you a word of caution in that I would hate to see such a fine mind become so self-absorbed that it fails to separate the finite from the infinite and to have the skill to live a life of immersion while resting in the truth of impermanence and illusion.

Let us toast this evening we have spent together and let us commit to meeting again and further exploring Torrents of Spring. Let me say, dear Ernest, in all honesty you had me at “PART ONE: Red and Black Laughter.”

Ernest Hemingway’s earliest published writings (outside of his journalistic work) came in the 1920s. There was a satirical short story titled Torrents of Spring, published in 1926; and a collection of poems and short stories titled Three Stories and Ten Poems – a short story collection, published in 1923.