Re: friends of Ernie
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Mon, 12 Oct 1998 16:22:48 -0500
At 6:36 PM -0700 on 10/11/98, you wrote:
> By the way what have you been mulling over of "Fathers and Sons" ? I
> liked that story a lot. The Nick Adams stories are some of my
> favorites because I am from MI and I feel that Hemmingway really
> captures what Northern MI is like. I read "Soldier's Home" and I do
> see the similarities it shares with Salinger's stories. Seymour would
> be a character I would parallel with Krebs.
I have always thought it would be interesting to see Michigan after having
seen it only through Hemingway's writing, the way it was years of reading
about Paris much through Hemingway before I ever saw it, so when I did get
there, the city had a certain tang once I set foot in it.
"Fathers and Sons" haunts me because I've always (as a writer and as a
human) been taken with the topic of how we (I'm speaking of men) relate to
our fathers, and how we (should we men have children; I do not) pass along
our traits, and perhaps our fathers' traits too.
The territory inside Nick, in the story, is scorched -- as scorched as the
land in "Big Two-Hearted River" and as scorched, in its own way, as the
desolation he drives through with his son. There are the empty streets and
the traffic lights that will be reclaimed in the next year when the town
can't meet payments on them, and so many other heartbreaking vignettes.
And of course there is the scene of Nick's father's arrowheads and
specimens, burned by Nick's mother. Of course I wonder whether this is the
father Nick will be to his son -- a defeated and humiliated man -- and I
wonder how much HE wonders about this, and naturally I imagine myself, and
what kind of father *I* would be to a son.
I suppose I could go on if I had the ^**^%( book with me, but it's kind of
misplaced, and that's about all I can attribute from memory.
--tim