"A River Runs Through It: Recollection, Return, and Renovation in Hemingway's In Our Time and Wordsworth's Prelude"

In thinking of Hemingway and the Natural World, I turned almost immediately to the great English poet of Nature, William Wordsworth, as a possible source to either Hemingway's fiction or to our understanding of Hemingway's fiction. Several questions came to mind: What similarities might we see in the works of these two writers from different countries and different centuries, writing in different genres? How might Wordsworth have influenced Hemingway, if at all? How might the body of criticism written about one artist's work be helpful in understanding the other artist's work? The answers are quite interesting, and shed a great deal of light on Hemingway's fiction and the powers of nature and human imagination expressed in many of his works.

While I am not suggesting that Hemingway be considered strictly a "Romantic" artist, certainly there are elements of a Romantic aesthetic and sensibility in Hemingway's works, especially those about the natural world. In particular, those works which explore memory, recollection, and the emerging consciousness of a writer have a great deal in common, and may serve to illuminate each other.

Two such works are Wordsworth's The Prelude and Hemingway's In Our Time which, if read as unified works, are essentially Bildungsromans, tracing the early, formative lives and geographical wanderings of their respective writer-protagonists. Textually speaking, The Prelude exists in at least three different forms, from the concentrated two-part version of 1799, to the heavily revised and expanded 1805 version (consisting of thirteen books, and a conscious attempt to produce an epic in the Miltonic vein), neither of them published in Wordsworth's lifetime, to the 1850 version published posthumously by William's wife Mary, which contained an additional Book and on which the author had continued to work throughout the last 45 years of his life. Hemingway, of course, published In Our Time in his lifetime, so the textual history is somewhat more straightforward than that of The Prelude; however, the collection by Hemingway which was published posthumously by his wife Mary, A Moveable Feast, forms an interesting supplement to In Our Time as it provides a later reflection on and revision of the period during which the earliest collection was being produced. In this respect, A Moveable Feast comprises some of Hemingway's "emotions recollected in tranquillity", which, as we all know, is the famous Wordsworthian statement of how and when composition takes place. Such parallels, though, are beyond the scope of this paper, which concentrates on In Our Time as a portrait of a developing writer, the volume ending at the point where Nick Adams is about to begin recollecting those emotions. The renovatory power of Nature is something which Hemingway may have gathered from the little Wordsworth that he read. However, there is no evidence that he read all of The Prelude. While he owned the works of many of the Romantic poets, including Byron, Shelley, and Keats, the records we have show that Hemingway did not own any Wordsworth and there is no evidence that he read any Wordsworth beyond what was required of him in his high school English classes" (1). So, while we can be sure he read "Daffodils" and "The World is Too Much With Us", and possibly some classics like "Tintern Abbey" and the "Ode: Intimations of Immortality", we can probably be equally as sure he did not read Wordsworth's great myth of the poet's own making, The Prelude, a work which, nevertheless, bears a striking resemblance to Hemingway's In Our Time.

In the absence of any evidence of direct influence, we must look for another theoretical model which will account for the resemblances, some of which I will mention now, although the list is certainly not exhaustive:

1) Both works chronicle the growth of a writer's mind - this mind's unity might be disputed by some in regards to In Our Time, but even if we do not accept something approaching a unitary narrator, it is pretty clear that "Nick Adams" is destined to be a writer, and several of the stories are about his childhood, adolescence, and perhaps young adulthood. Wordsworth's epic poem, too, gives us episodes of his childhood and young adulthood, organized from the beginning to show the growth of a poet's mind, in what he parallels to a sacred calling:

To the open fields I told
A prophesy; poetic numbers came
Spontaneously, and clothed in priestly robe
My spirit, thus singled out, as it might seem,
For holy services.
(1805, I, 59-63)

2) Both works follow the growth of their narrator through a geographical pattern of departure and return, in Wordsworth's case from childhood in the Lake District, to college in Cambridge, walking through Wales and then to France, residence in London, and ultimately return to the Lake District; in Hemingway's book, the movement is from Michigan lake country, to Europe and war, Europe after the war, and ultimately back to the Michigan wilderness.

3) Each work encompasses the major, perhaps even the defining, historical event of its generation: The Prelude dedicates 2 or 3 Books (depending on the version) to the French Revolution, and much of the middle of In Our Time deals either directly with the Great War or with its effects on the lost generation.

4) The narrators in each work experience "border figures" of outcasts, or solitary wanderers, and attach some significance to these figures. For Wordsworth, they are beggars, discharged soldiers, and solitary shepherds; for Hemingway, ex-champion boxers and revolutionists.

5) There are parallels between specific events, too, like the witnessing, at an early age, of a gruesome death, in Wordsworth's case his description of the drowned man recovered from a lake:

At length, the dead man, 'mid that beauteous scene
Of trees and hills and water, bolt upright
Rose with his ghastly face, a spectre shape...
(1805, V, ll. 460-473)

The sun was coming up over the hills....
In the early morning on the lake sitting
in the stern of the boat with his father
rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
(IOT, p. 19)

6) In parallel with the geographical journey, and intimately connected in many ways to the sense of the sublime, there is a crude but archetypal movement in each narrator's education of a) early mental development, b) a crisis of apathy and despair, and c) a recovery of integrity, at a higher level than existed in a). The sense of place is extremely important to Wordsworth here, as the early experiences in the Lake District have made him proof against "the din/ Of towns and cities" ("Tintern Abbey", ll. 25-26), and Grasmere becomes truly the center of his universe. There are no parallel statements by Hemingway, but the mood of "Big Two-Hearted River" lends itself to this interpretation of physical/psychical return for healing purposes.

7) The operative agents in the third stage, the re-integration phase, are the natural world and simple people and pleasures. Some of Wordsworth's "border figures" assist in his recovery, as he observes shepherds and rural folk living "close to the land"; in the Hemingway volume, there are episodes in the last couple of stories, such as "Cross-Sountry Snow", where rural folk and the simple, basic values they represent figure in the overall sense of finding healthy, natural alternatives to the madness of Euro-American civilization. And, in the two parts of "Big Two-Hearted River", not only is the setting the natural world, but Nick takes to the Michigan forest in search of a Wordsworthian solitude.

8) Each work contains a dominant presence in the form of a river. The River Derwent and other references to rivers serve to structure The Prelude, which has several non-chronological passages and returns throughout. The collection In Our Time also records rivers throughout, as in "Out of Season", and concludes with two stories named "Big Two-Hearted River". In fact, as the title of this paper suggests, it is the river we want to return to below as both a trope for the development of the writer and a site for his restoration in each work.

As mentioned above, there is no evidence of a direct influence on Hemingway from Wordsworth's Prelude, so the preceding list is mostly intended to tantalize or frustrate. It is the rivers I want to focus on: the River Derwent and the Big Two-Hearted River. The trope of the river, so old and parallel to life itself, is all-encompassing enough to contain both works and a great deal more besides.

The River Derwent flows through Wordsworth's epic from nearly the beginning, providing a vehicle for the swirling returns of memory and narrative which punctuate and structure the whole poem. It is important to note that the river for Wordsworth is also connected to the power of the human imagination, which he so highly prized. But from the beginning, after twenty-five lines of conventional invocation, the river makes its presence felt:

Whither shall I turn, Or shall a twig or any floating thing
Upon the river point me out my course.
(1805, I, 29-32)

As oftentimes a river, it might seem,
Yielding in part to old remembrances,
Part swayed by fear to tread an onward road
That leads direct to the devouring sea,
Turns and will measure back his course - far back,
Towards the very regions which he crossed
In his first outset - so have we long time
Made motions retrograde, in like pursuit
Detained.
(1805, IX, 1-9)

we have traced the stream
From darkness, and the very place of birth
In its blind cavern, whence is faintly heard
The sound of waters...
(1805, XIII, 172-175)

The close identifications of the river with one's life, with the powers of the imagination, and with the writing of the poem itself are all associations we see in "Big Two-Hearted River". Sheridan Baker says of the story, " [e]very sentence of this story seems to sound a harmonic of larger and parallel meaning, as if it were in code. And the key is the river, the stream of consciousness, of time, of life" (in Benson, p. 152). Several other commentators on the story point out the river's significance as a metaphor or emblem for Nick's memory, especially memory stretching back before his assumed wounding, up to that crucial point, and beyond, with the swamp and the point at which the river narrows taking on added significance (2).

Nick enters the burned-over landscape of Northern Michigan remembering the placement of houses, saloons and other buildings from before. We understand that the protagonist, like the countryside, has been scarred by time and experience. The river catches Nick's attention, and his imagination, very early in the story (the second paragraph) and holds his attention as he sees trout and remembers what it is like to fish for them:

Nick's heart tightened as the trout moved.
He felt all the old feeling.
(IOT, p. 134)

The two parts of "Big Two-Hearted River" conclude the collection In Our Time and complete a common ritualistic pattern of separation, transition and incorporation (3) which loosely organizes the whole and also Wordsworth's Prelude. Nick Adams in the five stories from "Indian Camp" to "The Battler" can be seen as the child of nature gradually separated from Nature's embrace and into the society of people. M.H. Abrams, in discussing Wordsworth's Prelude, traces this separation back at least as far as the German Romantic notion (and ultimately to the Biblical Fall) of the "primary fracture" between man and nature which occurs when the child begins to think. Geoffrey Hartman, speaking of the "Intimations Ode", points out that Wordsworth "thinks aloud" in that poem, "as if thinking and grief had now an intimate link..." (Hartman, p. 273). Nick Adams seems a victim of precisely that primary fracture, and the hike into the Big Two-Hearted River provides the healing escape from the separation:

...Nick felt happy. He felt he had left
everything behind, the need for thinking, the
need to write, other needs. It was all back
of him.
(IOT, p. 134)

A great deal of care is taken in describing the ritualistic setting up of camp in Part I, and the ritualistic elements of fishing the river in Part II. The meal and coffee which close Part I bring Nick back in touch with memories of past trips, past friends, past activities. There is no mistaking this highly ritualized dimension to these stories, but equally if not more important is the setting: the natural world, the river, a sacred place:

...nature...is not an 'object' but a presence
and a power; a motion and a spirit; not
something to be worshiped and consumed, but
always a guide leading beyond itself.
(Hartman, p. 42)

The second part of "Big Two-Hearted River" shows us the care Nick takes in fishing. There is a clear and repeated emphasis on the ethics of fishing - on a code, if you will. This code clearly separates Nick from the majority of fishers, but at the same time re-incorporates him into a select group which respects the fish; indeed, the movement may be away from people altogether and towards an incorporation of the fisher with the fish, the human with the animal, the predator with its prey, which crosses the gap between those seemingly opposite terms and integrates Nick into his rightful place in nature.

The last half or so of Part II is all about Nick and the river. He is in the river; he follows the river; he looks down the river into the swamp. The parallel between the river and Nick's memory is inescapable here. Ultimately, he reaches a point in the river which intersects the present moment:

He wished he had brought something to
read. He felt like reading. He did not
feel like going on into the swamp...
Nick did not want to go in there now.
He felt a reaction against deep wading
with the water deepening up under his
armpits, to hook big trout in places
impossible to land them.
(IOT, p. 155)

We have reached
The time, which was our object from the first,
When we may (not presumptuously, I hope)
Suppose my powers so far confirmed, and such
My knowledge, as to make me capable
Of building up a work that should endure.
(1805, XIII, 274-279)

There are so many intriguing parallels between Wordsworth's epic poem on the imagination and Hemingway's ground-breaking collection of short stories you would swear the one influences the other. Or, it would be pretty to think so. I believe the two writers shared a sensibility, a sense of their own place in the canon, and an appreciation for the natural world and its value to the human imagination, that accounts for the similarities. What I have done here is to sketch some of the points of contact, concentrating on the trope of the river as it flows through both works, not in a direct line of descent, but as an emblem of consciousness and imaginative power common to many centuries, writers, and works. What was instructive, and I'm sure many of us as teachers have had this same experience, was the way a statement by a "Wordsworth critic" illuminated a story or a work or a theme in the Hemingway canon. Certainly on a thematic level, as conferences like this one are organized, finding common themes in works like The Prelude and In Our Time is not only easy but enlightening; after all, many of our courses are organized the same way. I can envision, for example, a course on any number of writers and the natural world, and I would include Wordsworth and, yes, Hemingway. Despite differing genres and world-views, both these works are basically Bildungsromans, and both conclude with the solitary poet-figure returning to a childhood natural setting in order to escape apathy, alienation, and despair suffered through the simple acts of growing up and achieving adult consciousness. That the possibility exists for regaining some elements of a lost paradise is perhaps best expressed by Wordsworth,

For the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day.
(Prospectus to The Recluse, ll. 52-55)

Notes

1. See Michael Reynolds, Hemingway's Reading, 1910-1940, pp. 40-41, for Hemingway's high school course descriptions; p. 203 for the poems we know he read. Back to Paper

2. For example, William Adair's "Landscapes of the Critical Mind: 'Big Two-Hearted River'" collected in Reynolds's Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time. Back to Paper

3. See van Gennep, The Rites of Passage. Back to Paper

4. In his Prospectus to The Recluse, Wordsworth makes clear that he intends the poem to be a part of the three-part magnum opus which he never completed. Wordsworth himself thought of the poem as "the poem to Coleridge"; the title "The Prelude" was chosen by his widow, Mary. The only part of The Recluse to be published in Wordsworth's lifetime was The Excursion, in 1814. Back to Paper