07/27/2007

Hemingway as just another teenage kid in the summer

Exhibit shows author, family, life 'Up North'

By MARTA HEPLER DRAHOS

mdrahos@record-eagle.com

Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Library and the Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University
A young Ernest Hemingway walks along the beach at Walloon Lake in 1916.

PETOSKEY — Northern Michigan inspired many of Ernest Hemingway's earliest and best works of fiction.

Yet nothing about the time he spent here or the notes he wrote back home hinted at the literary genius he would become, says a Michigan Hemingway expert.

"He's always romanticized as Hemingway, the Pulitzer Prize winner,” said Frank Boles, director of the Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University, sponsor of a new exhibit on the author's summer years with his family between 1899 and 1921. "This is some teenage kid beating around northern Michigan, getting into the kind of minor trouble teenage kids would get into. He's just a typical teenager. It sort of pulls you away from that mystique of Hemingway, the famous author.”

"Up North with the Hemingways” opens Saturday at Crooked Tree Arts Center in Petoskey. Co-sponsored by the Michigan Hemingway Society, the exhibit tells the story of the Hemingway family's Michigan experiences through 30 or 40 artifacts from the library and from private Hemingway family collections.

"It will have some of our best things,” said Boles, who oversees a Hemingway collection of more than 500 items.

Among those that will be on exhibit are a letter from Hemingway to his father describing his work on the family's northern Michigan farm, and a postcard home from a fishing trip on Seney's Fox River that became the basis for the short stories, "The Big Two Hearted River.”

"It's a classic kid postcard — 'Having a good time, catching a lot of fish' — although I think he was in his 20s at the time,” Boles said. "Reading that postcard, you expect to flip it over and see a giant mosquito.”

The postcard was pre-addressed and stamped by Hemingway's father, as if to make sure Hemingway wrote home, Boles noted.

Other exhibit items include a handwritten unpublished fragment from a story Hemingway wrote as a young man about a Michigan lumber camp; a booklet he created as a child that includes a story about a porcupine and a photograph of fish caught in northern Michigan; and a five-page letter he wrote in 1919 urging war buddy Jim Gamble to join him for the summer.

"He goes on for four pages about how wonderful northern Michigan is,” Boles said. "It's a wonderful letter.”

Also on display: several photographs of Hemingway and the family taken at their Walloon Lake cottage, Windemere, and in the area's woods, lakes and streams where Hemingway learned to hunt and fish; information and photos of ships, trains, and automobiles the Hemingways used to travel from their Chicago area home to northern Michigan; first editions of magazines that printed Hemingway's Michigan stories in the 1920s; and family photographs never before seen by the public.

In total, the exhibit paints a surprising portrait of Hemingway and his family as down-to-earth cottagers who just happened to be well enough off to own their own place, Boles said.

"I think the surprise is that the Hemingways were such a normal group of summer people,” he said. "There's nothing here, looking at these pictures, that says, 'Ah, greatness is born.' It's just a family having fun. There's one of them roasting marshmallows over a fire — what's more normal in northern Michigan than that?”

The exhibit runs through Aug. 25, with free admission. Its opening coincides with the 18th annual Hemingway Weekend of the Michigan Hemingway Society, Friday through Sunday at the Odawa Hotel in Petoskey. The event features speakers, tours, short story discussions and a private opening reception for the exhibit.

Regular gallery hours are 9 a.m.-5 p..m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday and noon-4 p.m. Sunday. For more information, call (231) 347-4337.