In Chapter 3 of Philip Roth's Exit Ghost, Amy Bellette shows narrator Nathan Zuckerman an unpublished letter to the editor she once sent to The New York Times. The occasion had been a Times piece of "cultural journalism" for which the reporter had travelled to Michigan to interview the real-life models for the characters in Ernest Hemingway's early stories. Here's an excerpt from her letter, which is to say, an excerpt from the novel:
Hemingway's early stories are set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, so your cultural journalist goes to the Upper Peninsula and finds out the names of the locals who are said to have been models for the characters in the early stories. Surprise of surprises, they or their descendants feel badly served by Ernest Hemingway. These feelings, unwarranted or childish or downright imaginary as they may be, are taken more seriously than the fiction because they're easier for your cultural journalist to talk about than the fiction. The integrity of the journalist's informant is never questioned--only the integrity of the writer.
And the letter goes on and on--Amy, its author, is in a state of high dudgeon, and one feels that the narrator, Zuckerman, who is Philip Roth's alter ego, agrees with every word. What, then, should we make of the fact that Hemingway's early stories are not set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula? Hemingway grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb that abuts Chicago on the west, but the family kept a summer home on Walloon Lake, in Charlevoix and Emmet Counties, Michigan. The above map shows the region. It's not in the Upper Peninsula, but just to the southwest of the Lower Peninsula's northern tip. Here is a map, from Wikipedia, showing the location of Walloon Lake within the state of Michigan:
On the map at the top of this post, Walloon Lake is the smaller and more eastward of the two big lakes shown. It's clear that this is the area, known intimately by Hemingway on account of his boyhood summers spent there, in which his early stories are set. For example, from the story called "Up In Michigan":
Hortons Bay, the town, was only five houses on the main road between Boyne City and Charlevoix. . . . A steep sandy road ran down the hill to the bay through the timber. From Smith's back door you could look out across the woods that ran down to the lake and across the bay. It was very beautiful in the spring and summer, the bay blue and bright and usually white caps on the lake out beyond the point from the breeze blowing from Charlevoix and Lake Michigan.
The story called "The Battler" begins with Nick Adams being thrown from a car on a freight train he had jumped at Walton Junction, one of Michigan's "lost towns," which was just to the south of Fife Lake. The train had passed through Kalkasca, and Nick surmises that "he must be nearly to Mancelona." You can see, from the below map, that he's just to the south of the "Up In Michigan" setting, and headed north to his destination, where all these early Nick Adams stories are set. Nick's girlfriend, Marge, figures in some of them. She's from Charlevoix, the town on the narrow strip of land between the eastern shore of Lake Michigan and the northwestern end of Lake Charlevoix, the larger of the two lakes on the top map. The story called "The End of Something" begins with the history of Hortons Bay:
In the old days Hortons Bay was a lumbering town. No one who lived in it was out of sound of the big saws in the mill by the lake. Then one year there were no more logs to make lumber. The lumber schooners came into the bay and were loaded with the cut of the mill that stood stacked in the yard. All the piles of lumber were carried away. The big mill building had all its machinery that was removeable taken out and hoisted on board one of the schooners by the men who had worked in the mill. The schooner moved out of the bay toward the open lake carrying the two great saws, the travelling carriage that hurled the logs against the revolving, circular saws and all the rollers, wheels, belts and iron piled on a hull-deep load of lumber. Its open hold covered with canvas and lashed tight, the sails of the schooner filled and it moved out into the open lake, carrying with it everything that had made the mill a mill and Hortons Bay a town.
I don't really know what to make of this. Did Philip Roth (and his editor), like Homer, nod? If so, it's sort of rich, since it amounts to Amy's creator displaying that he is innocent of the geographic setting for the Hemingway stories--even as he has his character aggressively criticize the Times for ignoring Hemingway's fiction in order to write up some gossip that their "critic" is able to dredge up, discuss, and present to subscribers as "cultural criticism." In other words, the Times is lectured for not caring about literature, and the lecture reveals that the lecturer hasn’t troubled himself about such a significant detail as where “up in Michigan” these fictions are set. Imagine Roth on the subject of a pontificating reviewer who misplaced the Weequahic neighborhood within the city of Newark. The other possibility is that the mistake is deliberate, in which case Roth is injecting into the narrative something like an inside joke that tends to amplify Amy's point: not even she knows what she's talking about (though at least she's ahead of the Times).
Comments