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.
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under that title in 1972, in an edition which attempted to chronologically arrange the tales and also added previously unpublished fragments found after Hemingway's death.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.
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.
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.
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."
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"We get not peace in our time, O Lord."
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.
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.
"Give us peace in our time, O Lord ..."
Please.
- Tim Bazzett, author of Soldier Boy and Love, War & Polio
