Nick Adams Stories

In the spring of 2008 the first Great Michigan Read was launched, a program which encouraged state residents to join in the reading and discussion of one book. The book chosen for this ambitious and worthy project was a classic: Ernest Hemingway's The Nick Adams Stories. Program coordinators throughout the state went to great pains to publish and distribute background information on the the book and on the Hemingway family connections to northern Michigan. Many readers were surprised to learn that Ernest Hemingway spent all the summers of his youth at the family cottage on Walloon Lake near Petoskey. That area and other northern Michigan towns provide the settings for most of the tales of young Nick Adams, often called Hemingway's fictional alter ego. <br /> The Nick Adams Stories first appeared under that title in 1972, in an edition which attempted to chronologically arrange the tales and also added previously unpublished fragments found after Hemingway's death. Most of the original stories, however, were first published in 1925, when Hemingway was living in Paris, under the title, In Our Time. <br /> I read this collection the first time in 1968, in an American Lit class at Central Michigan University. Our professor, Dr. John Hepler, spent much of our clast time explaining what he called the collection's centerpiece story, "Big Two-Hearted River." It depicted Nick Adams' solitary fishing trip to a river near Seney, in the Upper Peninsula. Dr. Hepler carefully pointed out to us the utterly peaceful setting of the forest and the river, the small simple pleasures of the details of making camp and the process of fishing itself. Then he made sure we knew, that although the war is never mentioned in the narrative, it is nevertheless clear that Nick had come to this place to try to recover, to heal from some traumatic event. <br /> Hemingway himself was seriously wounded during his service in the First World War and spent several months recovering in a hospital in Italy, so the events of the war were still fresh in his mind when he wrote those first stories, set in upper Michigan. But Nick Adams stands for much more than just the author's own experiences. His character and the reaching out for healing represented a whole generation of young men damaged by war. <br /> It was in that same CMU classroom that I also learned the source of that first story collection's original title, In Our Time. It was a line from the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer - "Give us peace in our time, O Lord." <br /> Dr. Hepler drove this home to us, continuing, perhaps in his own paraphrasing: "We get not peace in our time, O Lord, But only violence and numbness." <br /> I remembered all this as I re-read the stories with great interest this year, nearly forty years later. From March to May, I helped facilitate group discussions of the book at libraries in Osceola, Mecosta and Lake Counties. As we talked of Hemingway's life and his stories, and the pristine beauty of the rivers and forests of northern Michigan, the pleasures of fishing and the healing powers of nature, all agreed on one thing: we still get not "peace in our time. <br /> Reflecting on these talks, I considered how this has been true in my own family. My mother was born in 1916, during the First World War. Her first four sons were all "war babies," born in the World War II years. I was the fourth, born in 1944. Her last two children were born during another war, Korea. <br /> I served in the army from 1962 to 1965, during the Cold War, but it was also the Vietnam era. The first American casualty in Vietnam was in 1961. <br /> My first son was born in 1969, the second in 1971. By those years hundreds of American soldiers were dying in Southeast Asia every week. Body counts and casualty figures were a staple on evening news broadcasts - "violence and numbness" prevailed. <br /> My older son served in the army during the first Gulf war, a mercifully brief conflict which saw a limited number of American deaths. But Jeff, who was working as a "psych tech" in the psychiatric ward of Landstuhl Army Hospital at the time, told me some heartbreaking stories of a few patients, mostly officers and NCOs, brought in from the war zone who had simply cracked under the protracted pressure of responsibility and the tension of waiting, and wondering what would happen, and how they would respond - emotional casualties of modern warfare. <br /> My first three grandchildren were born in 2004 and 2007 - "war babies" like their fathers, and like my mother and me. There are two more grandchildren due later this year in our family. It seems an inevitable given that these too will be children born under the shadow of war. <br /> "We get not peace in our time, O Lord." <br /> Sadly, I know that this pattern of birth and death and war that I find in my own family history is refelected and repeated endlessly in millions of families in this country and around the world, and is likely to continue. <br /> Ernest Hemingway experienced firsthand the physical fear and pain and the emotional trauma that the violence of combat can bring. He managed to convey these feelings in his fiction - in those first stories of Nick Adams, and, later, in his classic and heartbreaking novel, A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway went on to a brilliant career in writing, but he always carried with him those psychic scars of war. In 1961 he took his own life. But his stories live on and can still teach us something. The Nick Adams Stories was an excellent book selection for the first Great Michigan Read. More than eighty years have passed since Hemingway wrote those stories, but they are still relevant. They still give us pause, make us think. <br /> "Give us peace in our time, O Lord ..." <br /> Please. <br /> <br />- Tim Bazzett, author of Soldier Boy and Love, War & Polio <br /> <br />

This is a very interesting set of stories, including some less known and uneven works, but also including first rate pieces. "The Killers", of course, is a classic. The most emotionally affecting story is "Indian Camp", which involves the protagonist's youthful witness of a suicide and talking it through with his father. The story is moving in large part because of the sensitive treatment of the child's struggle with his own mortality and in part given how Hemingway's own life ended. It is wonderfully written and vivid. <br /> <br />Many of the stories deal with fishing, hunting, and the outdoors. "Big Two-Hearted River" and the "Last Good Country" paint romantic pictures of the great outdoors and are quite well done. The latter has a harder edge of a kid on the run, though, as with many of the stories, I'm not satisfied with how Hemingway ends the story. Many of the stories leave you hanging. <br /> <br />The idea of the "Nick Adams" stories is that this is a character (along with his friend "Bill") that reappears time and again, and appears to be autobiographical. Ironically enough, in one of the stories Hemingway talks about writing and criticizes Joyce's work (except for Ulysses) for being too autobiographical. One needs more distance from the main character to keep from lapsing into romanticisim and sentimentality, argues Hemingway. It's better just to make things up, he continues. Are the Nick Adams stories truly Hemingway's best by reason of this same criticism? <br /> <br />Also fascinating is the extent to which Hemingway's characters define themselves in their connection with the outdoors and with their friends. There is very little mention of one's work. Americans in the 21st century are all about their work and define themselves through their work and their relation to family. Hemingway does not write a great deal about the former (though he does spend some limited time on the latter). It's not necessarily a deficit in his work, but it does indicate how times have changed. <br /> <br />One very good story concerns a punch drunk boxer who picks a fight with Nick Adams. It's a moving and vivid story, but marred by the gratuitous racism directed toward "the nig___r" who breaks up the fight before it starts. Yes, that's the word used at the time, but Hemingway lingers a bit too much over the "nig___r" way in which the character talks. There's a mean-spiritedness to Hemingway that is quite disconcerting. <br /> <br />On the whole, this is an interesting collection that includes some pricelessly good stories.

This is clearly an autobiographical, but fictional, compendium of stories about Nick Adams (Hemingway) in his youth. It focuses mostly on the wilds of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and specifically around the area we now know as "Seney" (now a national wildlife refuge). <br /> <br />Hemingway takes us on trips into the wilderness with his father, a doctor; trout fishing; fighting with railroad hobos; lovemaking, and much more. Many of these stories are unfinished... they just leave you hanging to fill in the conclusion with your own imagination. <br /> <br />What we get, mostly, out of this book is a peek into the motivations of Hemingway's bawdy, "in your face" telling of adventure tales. They are all quite good. <br /> <br />Some of these stories had been previously published but, in the end, 8 of these stories had remained unpublished. So, the idea of this book was to gather them all into one place, which is what was effected here. <br /> <br />My edition of this book is an old library copy, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1972. It is a hardcover copy which includes a Preface by Hemingway critic Philip Young. The font is nice and large, but not "largeprint" by any means -- it's just nice and easy to read. There are 24 stories in total and the work is 268 pages in length. <br /> <br />This one is not for everybody but if you enjoy short tales of the wild outdoors, encapsulated by Hemingway's turbulent writing style, then you'll much enjoy this volume.