Big Two-Hearted River

Short story by Ernest Hemingway

"Big Two Hearted River" is a two part short story written by American author Ernest Hemingway, published in the 1925 Boni & Liveright edition of In Our Time, the first American volume of Hemingway's short stories. It features a single protagonist, Hemingway's recurrent autobiographical character Nick Adams, whose speaking voice is heard just three times. The story explores the destructive qualities of war which is countered by the healing and regenerative powers of nature. When it was published, critics praised Hemingway's sparse writing style and it became an important work in his canon. The story is one of Hemingway's earliest pieces to employ his Iceberg Theory of writing; a modernist approach to prose in which the underlying meaning is hinted at, rather than explicitly stated. "Big Two Hearted River" is almost exclusively descriptive and intentionally devoid of plot. Hemingway was influenced by the visual innovations of Cézanne's paintings and adapted the painter's idea of presenting background minutiae in lower focus than the main image. In this story, the small details of a fishing trip are explored in great depth, while the landscape setting, and most obviously the swamp, are given cursory attention.

In 1922, Hemingway moved with his wife Hadley to Paris, where he worked as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. He became friends with and was influenced by modernist writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. The year 1923 saw his first published work, a slim volume titled Three Stories and Ten Poems, followed the next year by another collection of short vignettes, in our time (without capitals). Hoping to have in our time published in New York, in 1924 he began writing stories to add to the volume with "Big Two Hearted River" planned as the final piece. He started writing the story in May of that year but did not finish until September as he spent the summer helping Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford launch the journal the transatlantic review. "Big Two Hearted River" has strong autobiographical elements. During World War I, Hemingway signed on as a member of the Red Cross at age 19, and was sent to the Italian Front at Fossalta as an ambulance driver. On his first day there, he helped to retrieve the remains of female workers killed in a munitions factory explosion, about which he later wrote in Death in the Afternoon: "I remember that after we searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments". A few days later, on July 8, 1918, he was severely wounded when a mortar bomb exploded between his legs. He was sent to a hospital in Milan where he recuperated for six months; after his return home, he went on a week long fishing and camping trip in September 1919 with two high school friends to the backcountry near Seney in Michigan's Upper Peninsula—a trip that became the inspiration for "Big Two Hearted River". The manuscript shows the use of plural pronouns, suggesting that in an early version more characters were included, but by publication any mention of his friends or the townspeople had been removed—leaving Nick alone in the woods. Hemingway gave the draft to Stein to read in October 1925; she advised cutting the 11 page section of stream of consciousness reminiscences written from Nick's point of view. Hemingway took her advice, reworked the ending, and wrote to his editor: "I have discovered that the last eleven pages of the last story in the book are crap". Biographer James Mellow writes that at this early stage in his career Hemingway had not developed his talent enough to fully and capably integrate self reflections in his writing; Mellow also believes the deleted passage might have been a "tour de force" had it been written at a more mature period in Hemingway's development. On October 5, 1925, the expanded edition of In Our Time (with conventional capitalization in the title) was published by Boni & Liveright in New York. The last story in the volume was the two part "Big Two Hearted River". The piece was later included in Hemingway's collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty Nine Stories published in October 1938, and in two collections of short stories published after his death, The Nick Adams Stories (1972) and The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition (1987). The fragment Hemingway cut was published posthumously as a separate short story titled "On Writing" in 1972 in The Nick Adams Stories.

Hemingway saw World War I as the "central fact of our time". "Big Two Hearted River" hints at both widespread physical devastation and Nick's personal war and post war experience, but neither of these central facts are directly mentioned. Hemingway scholar Joseph Flora makes the observation that Hemingway portrays Nick's character coping "more meaningfully than he had ever done before, with the issues of life and death". Biographer Phillip Young sees the story as basically concerned with a description of a young man "trying desperately to keep from going out of his mind." Nick returns wounded, and introduces a character type Hemingway used again in his later stories and novels. The theme of an unspecified wound is introduced, a device that was to culminate in Jake Barnes' character in The Sun Also Rises. Although Hemingway's best fiction such as "Big Two Hearted River" perhaps originated from the "dark thoughts" about the wounding, Jackson Benson believes that autobiographical details are employed as framing devices to make observations on life in general and not just Nick's own experiences. Adair views the river setting as a fictional representation of the Piave River near Fossalta, the site of Hemingway's mortar wound. Hemingway may have taken the idea of the swamp from the terrain in the battle of Portogrande—a battle that Hemingway wrote about in a 1922 newspaper story, saying of it: "Austrians and Italians attacked and counter attacked waist deep in swamp water". Furthermore, Adair suggests that Hemingway's own wounding is reflected in the scene where Nick loses a fish—the "biggest one I ever had"—with descriptive imagery such as shoes "squelchy" with water, suggestive of Hemingway's recollection of "feeling as if his boots were filled with warm water (blood) after his wounding." Writing in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway remembered "Big Two Hearted River", recalling when he "sat in a corner with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in the notebook  When I stopped writing I did not want to leave the river where I could see the trout in the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log driven piles of the bridge. The story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it."

Hemingway was inspired by Ezra Pound's writings and applied the principles of imagism to his own work. Pound's influence can be seen in the stripped down, minimalist style characteristic in Hemingway's early fiction. Betraying his admiration for the older writer, he admitted that Pound "taught [me] more about how to write and how not to write than any son of a bitch alive". He also learned from James Joyce, who further instilled the idea of stripped down economic prose. Hemingway's short stories from the 1920s adhere to Pound's tight definition of imagism; biographer Carlos Baker writes that in his short stories Hemingway tried to learn how to "get the most from the least, [to] prune language, [to] multiply intensities, [to] tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth". The iceberg theory has been termed the "theory of omission". Hemingway believed a writer could convey an object or concept while writing about something entirely different. In "Big Two Hearted River" he elaborates on the mundane activities Nick carries out. The story is filled with seemingly trivial detail: Nick gathers grasshoppers, brews coffee, catches and loses a large trout. In this climactic event, however, the excitement and tension becomes so strong that Nick betrays his inner thoughts and he takes a break. Hemingway has said he believes this avoidance made the heart and thrust of the story all the more acute, writing "'Big Two Hearted River' is about a boy beat to the wide coming home from the war  beat to the wide was an earlier and possibly more severe form of beat, since those who had been were unable to comment on this condition and could not suffer that it be mentioned in their presence. So the war, all mention of the war, anything about the war is omitted." Flora believes that in "Big Two Hearted River" the concept of the iceberg theory is more evident than in any other piece written by Hemingway. He avoided complicated syntax to reflect Nick's wish that the fishing trip be uncomplicated. An analysis of the text shows that about 70 percent of the sentences are simple sentences—a childlike syntax without subordination—and that repetition is often substituted for subordinate thoughts. Furthermore, the repetition creates prose with a "rhythmic, ritualistic effect" that emphasizes important points. The lengths of the paragraphs vary with short paragraphs intensifying the action. Benson writes that in "Indian Camp" and "Big Two Hearted River" Hemingway's prose was sharper and more abstract than in other stories, and that by employing simple sentences and diction—techniques he learned writing for newspapers—the prose is timeless with an almost mythic quality. Hemingway wanted the structure of "Big Two Hearted River" to resemble a Cézanne—with a detailed foreground set against a vaguely described background. In a letter to Stein from August 1924, he wrote, "I have finished two long stories  and finished the long one I worked on before I went to Spain where I am doing the country like Cézanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit. It is about 100 pages long and nothing happens and the country is swell. I made it all up". His description of the river and the countryside betray the influence of the Post Impressionist style. Hemingway was heavily influenced by the modernists. He often visited the Musée du Luxembourg, where he saw three Cézanne paintings, L'Estaque, Cour d'une ferme, and Les Peupliers. A series of Cézanne watercolors were exhibited at Berheim Jeune Gallery before he began writing the story. Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast that he had been "learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them." Comparing "Big Two Hearted River" to Cézanne's paintings, Berman observes that Hemingway established a "representation of form, space and light", and that the dense descriptive passages give "light and form  overwhelmingly visual, intensely concerned with spatiality", while in the middle ground, "We sense [the trees] through vertical forms and dark colors only". Kenneth Johnston believes Hemingway's use of symbolism is a substitute for paint and brushstrokes. He views the description of the town after the fire, and the railroad tracks, as words "slash[ed] across the landscape", with a physicality similar to a Cézanne landscape. The minutely detailed passages of the campsite and Nick's mundane activities fill the story's foreground, while the forest and menacing swamp, relegated to the background, are described vaguely and only in passing. The river acts as a barrier between the foreground and background, and is present as deep in places, shallow in others, with currents that are either slow or fast. Berman says Nick is shown as a figure in a painting—seen in the foreground at the campsite and at a distance from the murky background of the swamp.

In Our Time was published as part of Pound's modernist series by Three Mountains Press, Paris in 1924. The work was well received by critics; Edmund Wilson described the writing as "of the first distinction", and in the 1940s he again wrote of "Big Two Hearted River", "along with the mottled trout  the boy from the American Middle West fishes up a nice little masterpiece." When the story was published in the United States, critics asserted Hemingway had reinvigorated the short story by his use of declarative sentences and his crisp style. In 1952, reviewing The Old Man and the Sea—for which Hemingway would win the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature—The New York Times said of "Big Two Hearted River" that it was one of the "best and happiest of his early short stories". Carlos Baker views the stories of In Our Time as a remarkable achievement for a young writer. Joseph Flora described "Big Two Hearted River" as "unquestionably the most brilliant of the collection In Our Time". According to Benson, despite Pound and Joyce's influence, Hemingway "carried the new form into the position of dominant influence" for much of the 20th century. Unlike other modernist writers, who wrote of man cut off from the past, Hemingway placed his narratives in the present and hence became "the true modernist".