Michigan Literary Luminaries: From Elmore Leonard to Robert Hayden

by Anna Clark

Overview

Discover the novelists, poets, and others who are part of this Midwestern state's rich literary tradition.
 
From Ernest Hemingway's rural adventures to the gritty fiction of Joyce Carol Oates, the landscape of the "Third Coast" has inspired generations of the nation's greatest storytellers.
 
Michigan Literary Luminaries shines a spotlight on this rich heritage of the Great Lakes State. Discover how Saginaw greenhouses shaped the life of Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Theodore Roethke. Compare the common traits of Detroit crime writers like Elmore Leonard and Donald Goines. Learn how Dudley Randall revolutionized American literature by doing for poets what Motown Records did for musicians, and more. With a mixture of history, criticism, and original reporting, journalist Anna Clark takes us on a surprising literary tour.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625854698
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	01/23/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Anna Clark is a journalist in Detroit. Her writing has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Detroit Free Press, the New York Times, Politico, the Columbia Journalism Review and other publications. She edited A Detroit Anthology, a 2015 Michigan Notable Book. Anna graduated from the University of Michigan and from Warren Wilson College's MFA Program for Writers. She grew up in St. Joseph, Michigan, a little town she loves.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Ernest Hemingway in the North Woods

Living memory of Ernest Hemingway has nearly died out, not only among his old fishing buddies in the richly forested tip of Michigan's mitten but also among his descendants who visit the north woods. It is only now, as firsthand accounts fade, that these little towns have begun to celebrate their connection to the writer, in both life and literature.

Chris Struble is the sort of man who wears a green fleece vest over his collared shirt while working at his downtown Petoskey jewelry store. Struble — middle-aged and bald with a friendly smile — is a jewelry designer and metalsmith who leads Haunted Petoskey tours. He moonlights as the president of the Michigan Hemingway Society, which advocates for a deeper understanding of the author's connection to the state.

As Struble tells it, it was only about ten years ago that Northern Michigan began to embrace Hemingway as part of local culture. Even now, "there's still resistance. It's a weird thing," he said to me. One local library did not even have any of his books until the Hemingway Society intervened. In trying to make sense of this, Struble, a Northern Michigan native, speculates that midwestern politeness might be partly to blame. Holding a lecture on, say, the legacy of mental illness in Hemingway's family would be uncomfortable when his relatives are present. Local personalities on whom the author based his characters cannot help but take his stories personally — and not always in a cheerful way. Best to keep quiet, then.

What's more, Struble said, Northern Michigan holds tight to its traditional low-key culture. It is wary of hooking its reputation to a celebrity, even a literary one. In other words, as he put it, "we do what we do well, and we don't need Hemingway."

But that is changing. Northern Michigan is finding new and thoughtful ways to honor the stories that Hemingway told about the region while in turn telling its own Hemingway stories

* * *

As soon as it was safe for the boy to travel, they bore him away to the northern woods. It was a long and complicated journey for a child only seven weeks old.

Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story was the first great biography of the writer, a seven-hundred-page tome by Carlos Baker, a Princeton University professor who spent seven years writing it. The book begins not by highlighting the Nobel laureate's great works, or even his hometown of Oak Park, Illinois. Instead, in the first sentence of the first chapter, Baker places Hemingway in Northern Michigan, the landscape that was the great love of his life.

Hemingway's family lived in a gracious home just outside Chicago, where his father worked as a doctor. But when summer rolled around, they traveled to a cottage just off the shore of Walloon Lake that Clarence "Ed" Hemingway and his wife, Grace, built in 1898. These were the early days of "Up North" tourism, nearly six decades before the building of a bridge to connect Michigan's two peninsulas. Railroad companies had only just extended their lines northward, where large land grants were designed to encourage people to settle there. Railroads, local merchants and steamship companies partnered for a massive tourism campaign that turned out to be persuasive. Once people got a taste for the cool, clean air blowing off the Great Lakes, they kept coming back for it — or decided to stay permanently. In 1873, Petoskey was home to two families, according to local historian and Hemingway scholar Michael R. Federspiel. By 1900, the first full summer that the Hemingways spent at the cottage, Petoskey had about six thousand full-time residents. The city has about the same population today — but in the summer, that number more than quadruples.

While Ed and Grace Hemingway were part of a larger turn-of-the-century movement, they did not spend their summers at the fashionable shoreline resorts popping up in Petoskey and Traverse City. They opted for a tidy little inland cottage, surrounded by forests, farms and settlements of Ottawa and Ojibwa Indians. They called it Windemere; Grace chose the fanciful name "Windermere" as an echo of the famed English lake, but everyday shorthand soon simplified it. Hardly a modern-day McMansion, it was built for $400, or about $11,000 in today's dollars, and it measured twenty feet by forty feet, with no electricity or plumbing. The family bathed in the lake, just down a sandy road. A small outhouse was situated in a thicket of evergreens on a low hill. The one-story frame structure, built with local lumber, had a porch, a brick fireplace, white pine paneling, oil-lamp lighting, an iron-handled pump for well water and two bedrooms. As the family grew to six children — the fifth child, Carol, was born at Windemere, delivered by Ed himself — the cottage's two cushioned window seats were used as beds. The family later added a kitchen wing, which connected to the house by a screened-in dining area, and a three-bedroom sleeping annex just behind the cottage for the kids. But Hemingway eventually took up the habit of sleeping by himself in a tent pitched outside, near the rail fence.

This was the twilight of the timber industry. In the Nick Adams stories that Hemingway later wrote, featuring the character that was his youthful alter ego, the sounds of logging are laced throughout the text. "The End of Something" begins with a description of Horton Bay, two miles from Windemere on Lake Charlevoix. Hemingway persistently referred to it as "Horton's Bay," reflecting his colloquial way of describing the place. For him, it was a name spoken and heard, not read on a map.

In the old days Horton's 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 removable 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 wheels, belts, and iron piled on a hull- deep load of lumber. Its open hold covered with canvas was 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 Horton's Bay a town ... Ten years later there was nothing of the mill left except the broken white limestone of its foundations showing through the swampy second growth.

Hemingway spent the first twenty-two summers of his life in Northern Michigan. He fished for pike, perch, bass and trout, both alone and with friends. He rowed in cool waters, cooked over an open fire and pored over books. His daily chore was to fetch milk from a neighboring farm, padding back up the dirt road as softly as he could, lest he spill. As a young child, he was fond of a large-form monthly serial called Birds of Nature; he surprised his mother when he correctly named seventy-three different kinds of birds. His father taught him how to properly handle a gun and how to use an axe to make a woodland shelter out of hemlock boughs. As Baker wrote in his biography, threading in lines from the story "Fathers and Sons":

The boy's later memories of his father were nearly always in outdoor settings — flushing jacksnipe on the prairies; walking through dead grass or harvest fields where corn stood in shocks; passing by grist or cider mills or trickling lumber dams. He thought of his father whenever he saw a lake or an open fire or a horse and buggy or a flight of wild geese, or whenever there was wood to be split or water to be hauled ... "He liked to work in the sun on the farm because he did not have to," and loved all forms of manual labor, as Ernest in his maturity did not.

Grace ensured that music, art and theater were constants in the lives of her children. She stacked the bookshelves with British authors, from Shakespeare to Dickens. At Windemere, she tracked the heights of the kids on the frame of the back porch door.

Over in Horton Bay, the Dilworths lived in Pinehurst Cottage. Jim had a blacksmith shop, and Elizabeth — whom Hemingway called Auntie Beth — ran a "chicken-dinner establishment" and country inn. Their son Wesley became Hemingway's friend, though he was seven years older. In the story "Up in Michigan," he refers to the family by name when he describes Horton Bay as "only five houses on the main road between Boyne City and Charlevoix ... Smith's house, Stroud's house, Dilworth's house, Horton's house and Van Hoosen's house. The houses were in a big grove of elm trees and the road was very sandy. There was farming country and timber each way up the road."

In 1905, the Hemingways bought forty acres across Walloon Lake and called it Longfield Farm. Ed planted fruit trees, while Hemingway scampered through the grass wearing "an Indian suit with fringed leggings." The following year, Hemingway's parents permitted the seven-year-old to bring a neighbor boy, Harold Sampson, on the summer trip. The boys played most often at Longfield. Upon discovering wooden crosstie rails used to haul lumber in open wagons, they hitched rides to Horton Bay to see Wesley, who took them fishing at the creek just west of the general store. Then Auntie Beth fed them crisp fried trout and chicken at Pinehurst.

American Indians lived in the low green hills around Windemere. They picked thick red raspberries and blackberries and sold them to summertime tourists. Hemingway's paternal grandfather rented a shack down by the water to a tall Indian who lived alone, walked through the woods at night and gave Hemingway a canoe paddle made of ash wood. Simon Green, a chubby Indian, lingered outside Dilworth's blacksmith shop and went shooting with the Hemingways. When Hemingway wrote his first story to appear in print — a bloody 1916 tale for his high school literary magazine — he set it in Northern Michigan. It is about a Cree man named Pierre who suspects his hunting partner has stolen his wallet.

Nick Boulton and Billy Tabeshaw were two Ojibwas who worked as sawyers. Nick's daughter Prudence sometimes worked for Grace. One summer day, Hemingway's father hired Nick and Billy to cut up beech logs that had broken off from a boom in the lake and drifted ashore. Hemingway watched as they chopped with cant hooks and axes, and he listened to their talk. He later reimagined that day in a short story called "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife." As well, the third short story Hemingway wrote for his school literary magazine was titled "Sepi Jingan," after Billy Tabeshaw's dog. In it, the dog saves Billy from a murderer who ties him to the Pere Marquette railway tracks.

It was not unusual for Hemingway's imagination to zero in on the macabre. The summer he turned fourteen, Harold Sampson again accompanied the family to Windemere. Hemingway's sister Marceline brought her friend Ruth. The four of them stayed up late reading Bram Stoker's Dracula beside the fireplace one August night. Haunted by it, Hemingway had nightmares after he went to sleep. He woke the whole household with his late-night yell. A couple years later, Hemingway retreated to his Uncle George's summer place in Ironton, on the other side of Lake Charlevoix, as a fugitive from the local game warden; Hemingway had impulsively shot a blue heron. He later confessed to a Boyne City judge, paid a fine of fifteen dollars and went home to help with harvesting the hay. In 1952, he fictionalized, and intensified, the incident in the "The Last Good Country"— an unfinished novella that was not published in his lifetime but was included in The Nick Adams Stories (1972).

In 1916, Hemingway took a fishing and hiking trip in the Upper Peninsula with his friend Lew Clarahan. After Lew caught a southbound train back to Chicago, Hemingway had seven hours to wait on the wooden platform for a train to Petoskey. He was increasingly serious about becoming a writer someday, so he spent the time making a list in the back of his diary of "good stuff" from the trip that he could turn into stories and essays. It came down to people and places: "(1) Old people at Boardman. (2) Mancelona Indian girl. (3) Bear Creek. (4). Rapid River." When Hemingway arrived in Petoskey, he walked over to the Hotel Perry and paid seventy-five cents for a quiet room. The next day, he hiked to Horton Bay, where the Dilworths fed him. In return, he helped with splitting wood and caught them eight rainbow trout in Horton Creek.

In 1918, Hemingway volunteered to be an ambulance driver during World War I. He served on battlefields in Italy. One hot July night, five weeks after his deployment and not long before his nineteenth birthday, Austrian forces fired a five-gallon tin full of metal projectiles into his camp. After the shock, Hemingway grappled for a wounded man near him who was crying. He lifted him up and carried him about fifty yards before he was shot in the leg by machine-gun fire. Somehow — Hemingway himself could never remember — he carried the man the remaining one hundred yards to safety before collapsing into unconsciousness. Hemingway convalesced in the north of Italy for five months, and for the rest of his life, he carried remnants of scaggia (shell fragments) in his legs. While in the hospital, he wrote postcards to his Northern Michigan friends: "Dear Auntie Beth, Save a place at the table for me ..."

Back in the United States, he struggled with a limp and with what now might be called post-traumatic stress disorder. He was lonely and out of sorts. In early June 1919, Hemingway returned to Horton Bay to recuperate physically and emotionally. He stayed with friends, assisted with farm work and occasionally had the Boyne City doctor look at his legs. He returned to writing short stories.

In the meantime, Hemingway met Marjorie Bump, a charming Petoskey high school girl who waited tables at the Dilworth's chicken-dinner restaurant. Marjorie had a crush on the handsome writer who sat on the Pinehurst porch and smoked Russian cigarettes. Marjorie's name is echoed in two Nick Adams stories, "The End of Something" and "The Three-Day Blow." Another Pinehurst waitress, older than Marjorie, stayed on past Labor Day to help Auntie Beth wind down the restaurant after the tourist season. She and Hemingway took long night walks together, and on the large dock at the end of the sandy lane, they were intimate. Two years later, while living in Paris, Hemingway fictionalized the encounter in a story called "Up in Michigan." Because of its nature, it had trouble getting into print in the United States. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway remembered writer Gertrude Stein's reaction upon reading a draft of the story.

"It's good," she said. "That's not the question at all. But it is inaccrochable. That means it is like a picture that a painter paints and then he cannot hang it when he has a show and nobody will buy it because they cannot hang it either."

On his final fishing trip of the summer of 1919, Hemingway went to the Upper Peninsula with a couple friends. The train took them to Seney, about fifteen miles from Lake Superior. "It's great northern air," Hemingway wrote, describing the north woods in a letter that year. "Absolutely the best trout fishing in the country. No exaggeration. Fine country. Good color, good northern atmosphere, absolute freedom, no summer resort stuff." In Seney, a railroad brakeman held the doors for Hemingway, who was still slow on his legs. The brakeman told the engineer, "Hold her up. There's a cripple and he needs time to get his stuff down." This astounded Hemingway, who was not accustomed to being seen as vulnerable. In fact, he put a good deal of effort in appearing just the opposite.

The Upper Peninsula fishing trip was the spark that ignited Hemingway's first great short story. He finished "Big Two-Hearted River" in 1924. In it, Nick Adams gets off the train in Seney. He hikes into the woods. He fishes for trout in the Big Two-Hearted — "clear brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom." Nick is haunted by something, but the text never tells the reader exactly what it is. Instead, Nick finds solace in ordinary rituals and practical tasks. He brews bitter coffee. He opens a can of pork and beans, which he cooks over the fire. He collects grasshoppers for bait. He sets up camp — "his home where he had made it." Fearing the feeling of being consumed, Nick avoids the swamp just up the river: "He felt a reaction against deep wading with the water deepening up under his armpits, to hook big trout in places impossible to land them ... In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure."

This sort of silence and repression was familiar to Hemingway, whose grandfathers were both Civil War veterans. The one on his mother's side, a thick-browed gentleman for whom Hemingway was named, had a Confederate Minié ball lodged in his thigh. Grace and Ed lived with him in Oak Park after their marriage, in the house where their son was born. Rather like Nick Adams, if not his grandson, the elder Hemingway never permitted the war to be discussed in his presence.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Michigan Literary Luminaries"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Anna Clark.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements,
Preface,
1. Ernest Hemingway in the North Woods,
2. Harriette Simpson Arnow's Mountain Path,
3. Poets of the City: Robert Hayden and Dudley Randall,
4. The Detroit Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates,
5. Jim Harrison's True North,
6. The Waking: Theodore Roethke,
7. Action Sequence: Elmore Leonard and Donald Goines,
8. What Philip Levine's Work Is,
Epilogue. How to Build a Literary Culture,
Selected Sources,
About the Author,