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The snows of disbelief--the fiction of our time
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You assume people know who Ernest Hemingway is."Wasn't he that writer guy?" A biography comes on television and he .jpg)
pops up in old films of movie stars or on a safari, but that time is past and the century is gone. It's become passe 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 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 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 filled 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. 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 turned back and returned to the car.
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