By Frank Boles
Over the past
decade the Clarke Library’s collection of material relating to Ernest Hemingway
life in Michigan has grown in both size and importance. This week, through the
generosity of several friends, we will add a new item, a first edition printing
of Hemingway’s first publication, Three
Stories & Ten Poems.
Published in 1923
in a run of only 300 copies the slender volume is in many ways a “capstone”
printed item in the library’s efforts to document Hemingway’s life in and
reflections about Michigan. The title of the book’s first short story, “Up in
Michigan” pretty much says everything one needs to know about what at the time
Ernest Hemingway thought was important and about what he felt he could write.
The Hemingway
collection now includes a wide variety of printed and manuscript material
documenting the life of Ernest Hemingway. As I have mentioned many times
before, the Hemingway family purchased property on Walloon Lake and built a
summer cottage there. Ernest, who was born in 1899, spent every summer at the
cottage from 1900 through 1920, with the exception of 1918. In 1921 he also
visited, when he married Hadley Richardson in nearby Hortons Bay and the two
honeymooned in the cottage.
Much of
Hemingway’s adult life was shaped by his experiences in and around Walloon
Lake, much more so than the family home in Oak Park, Illinois. Hemingway’s
opinion about Oak Park, where he spent the other nine months of the year, has
often been summarized through a Hemingwayesque sounding, although possibly
apocryphal quotation, that it was a place of “wide lawns and narrow minds.”
Whatever his
actual opinion about Oak Park, something Hemingway never shared in print, he
did draw from and write extensively about his summers in Michigan. The Nick
Adams stories tell the tale of a young man, learning about himself and the
world. The stories are not biography, exactly. As Hemingway himself would
write, “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really
happened.” Hemingway was after something more than a well-footnoted history.
The Clarke’s
role, however, has been to find and preserve documentation that can serve as
that well-footnoted history. Through original letters, scrapbooks of cottage
life compiled by Grace Hall Hemingway for her children, published
recollections, what “really happened” is told in the Clarke Library. Hemingway
himself, in his many published works about Michigan, told his readers what he
thought made his Michigan fiction “truer than if they had really happened.”