Michigan's "UP" in Literary Fiction

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is remote and sparsely populated. It is surrounded by Lake Superior to the north and Lakes Michigan and Huron to the south. People, most from Finland and Nordic countries, came for the jobs. In the 18th c it was an important sources of lumber and ore, with ships carrying its resources through the 'inland' sea to ports at Chicago and Detroit, Erie and Buffalo. The forests were decimated. There were copper mines, iron mines, and coal mines that created towns. The mines closed. Ford left a 'ghost town', Pequaming, now a tourist town, where once he harvested and processed wood for his cars.

With 3% of the population and a quarter of the land--but one area code-- the UP is its own region with distinctive characteristics, its own dialect, and even cuisine. Yoopers got pastys--meat pies--from Cornish immigrants, and Finnish delicacies can be found. Fishing is not just a hobby.

The UP was and still is a sportsman's paradise, a tourist's destination of great beauty. The same escarpment that creates the Niagara Falls created Tahquamenon Falls and other smaller falls in the UP. Agates lay on the Superior beaches. Lighthouses dot the coast. And now there are casinos.

Terry O'Quinn who played John Locke on Lost is from the UP as was actor James Tolkan.

There is a heritage of UP fiction, small but notable. Classics like Anatomy of a Murder, made into a movie with James Stewart. The author John D. Voelker used the pen name Robert Traver. Voelker retired from a successful law career to fly fish trout and write.

Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams stories were set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and ever since anyone writing about the UP has been compared to them.

The Hemingway family came from Chicago north along Lake Michigan to vacation in the various resort communities in Michigan. (Chicagoans still do this.) Hemingway visited Seney in 1919 for a fishing trip. He never returned to the UP. His stories, including The Big Two-Hearted River, have forever associated him with Michigan.

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I decided it was time to read a book by Michigan native Jim Harrison. NetGalley offered his newest novel, The Big Seven, set in the Newberry/Seney/Marqutte area of the UP. The novel's narrator first appeared in Harrison's novel The Great Leader.

The book refers to many Michigan places we have seen on trips Up North: Seney, Newberry, Marquette, Grand Marias.

Told in the first person narrative, we get to know the main character quite well--things I did not really want to know, too. Sunderson retired early from the Michigan State police where he was a detective. He drinks. He is obsessed with female posteriors. And he brought his work home, which contributed to the demise of his 40 year marriage to his ex, Diane, who he still loves.

In The Big Seven we learn about Sunderson's life long obsession with The Seven Deadly Sins, those which can condemn one to hell. He was a kid when he heard a sermon about them, and it has haunted him ever since. He constantly weighs his life, and other's, in terms of The Big Seven. He is sure there is a missing one: violence.

Sunderson and Diane had 'adopted' a neighbor's girl, Mona. Diane contact him because Mona is in trouble, dropping out of college to be a groupie. He tries to scare Mona's beau via blackmail. It didn't work, but he ends up with $10,000. He buys a remote cabin where he can indulge his love of trout fishing.

The cabin is situated in the midst of the Ames family--gun-totting, abusive, incestuous psychopaths. Sunderson intends to steer clear of them, but the Ames housekeeper/cook who comes with the cabin is found dead. Her replacement, another Ames family member named Monica, is a great cook who wants to escape her life. He is also befriended by her uncle, ex-com Lemuel Ames, a wannabe writer of crime fiction whose manuscript reads like a confession of murder. Sunderson finds himself deeply involved.

Meantime, Sunderson is trying to write a book about the eight deadly sin--violence.

I didn't enjoy being in Sunderson's head. His thoughts jump all over the place. He constantly commits several deadly sins, including lechery and gluttony. He is a man who just 'can't say no' when young women throw themselves at him. Plus there is the older neighbor who has set out to catch any many she can. Sunderson is upset by abuse of women and children, is well read, and basically not a horrible person. But reading his wandering thoughts and inner secrets can be in turns repulsive and dull. And yet...we see into a man who is honestly struggling with his own nature. There is also a black humor about things that happen. I realize that Harrison choose to write this book from Sunderson's viewpoint for a reason. The satisfying ending with Sunderson and Diane finding a compromise relationship is quite sweet. One wonders what Sunderson will be thinking about in a third novel.

In a Lansing State Journal interview Harrison said that his publisher was "upset about his next novel--'because it's about evil.'"
http://lansingonlinenews.com/news/msu-grad-jim-harrison-adds-two-books-this-year-to-his-collection/

It has been several days since I finished The Big Seven. I don't know if I will read another Harrison novel any time soon. But I won't soon forget it.

I received a free ebook in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Big Seven
by Jim Harrison
Grove Press
Publication February 3, 2015
ISBN: 9780802123336

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At a local author and book fair I met Royal Oak, MI native Peter Wurdock and purchased his book of short stories Bending Water and Stories Nearby, A Northern Michigan Short Story Collection. The stories are all set in the UP, with Newberry and Marquette often referenced. Illustrations include paintings and drawings.

Most of the stories concern people in crisis, facing dangerous situations, death, grief and the loss of loved ones, or at their lowest point in life. They must come to grips with the fact that in the end "Life'll  kill ya" as one character says. 

One story that deviates into whimsy is "Black Gold". Northern University student cousins on a short vacation before summer jobs at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island are exploring with a metal detector when they find a box with old coins. They realize their grandfather had a cabin in the area and wonder if  he had hidden the box. They ask family members about their grandfather's camp and life. He hobnobbed with Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, The comment "Maybe you found his treasure" and learning of their grandfather's link to the Jewish Mafia and missing slot machines spur them into renting scuba gear to search the lake bottom for 'black gold.'

Bending Water is available through Blue Boundry Book or Amazon.com and can be found at COSTCO stores.
ISBN 978-0-9894214-1-6, $13.99, paperback
$6.99 on Kindle

War Wounds: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

I have just read The Sun Also Rises, which I last read perhaps 30 or more years ago, and which I first encountered as a girl, perhaps 12 years of age, when I watched the movie version on Bill Kennedy's Showtime. As a girl I was moved by the story without understanding it. As a teen I bought the book and read it quite a few times. Now it is 2014 and I am over sixty, and the book seems profoundly sad and I understand it is not a love story, it is a war story.

For those who have not read this classic book, it is the story of men who had been soldiers in World War I and a woman who had been a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse. They meet up in Paris and plan to meet again at the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. In the interim, Jake is joined by his friend Bill for a fishing trip in Spain, a time of lyrical and idyllic beauty.

Lady Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes fell in love when she was his nurse during the war. Brett's first love died in the war. Jake's wounds prevent him from normal sexual function. Brett flits from one joyless, meaningless encounter to another, while depending on Jake to pick her up when things go wrong. Brett is engaged to a bankrupt drunkard who is very aware of her alliances with other men.

Their friends include Robert Cohn, whose Jewishness was targeted at Princeton so that he took up boxing. Robert was Jake's friend before he fell for Brett, who takes him up for amusement then discards him. Robert's jealous stalking of Brett leads him to beat up his rivals. Brett goes off with a beautiful and talented bull fighter half her age, unable to deny herself anything even when she knows it is wrong. The forward by Sean Hemingway refers to the "carnage" left in Brett's wake. When I read of the bulls tossing human bodies, I immediately thought of Brett.

"I can't help it. I've never been able to help anything."
"You ought to stop it."
"How can I stop it? I can't stop things....I've always done just what I wanted."

In the end Brett calls for Jake to rescue her from herself. Brett muses on what their life may have been like, and Jake replies "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

Hemingway's readers would have understood the background shared by these characters. The war is always present, although rarely discussed.

"It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening."

WWI saw 4,734,991 U.S. men in service. Of the 116,515 dead, 53,403 died in combat. Men dug trenches, then were sent 'over the top" into "no man's land" through a barrage of machine gun bullets, trying to reach the enemy trenches. Today we refer to "cannon fodder." Men going into the hail of bullets, no protection. Bodies piled up between the trenches.

204,002 men were wounded. And the wounds were horrible. Mustard gas blistered the skin and destroyed men inside and out and death could take weeks. Every war brings technological and medical advances. Plastic surgery was honed in this war, and the development of prosthesis and artificial noses and masks. Smithsonian Magazine had an article about The Faces of War  and the people who endeavored to restore a human face to the disfigured WWI soldiers.

Then there was Shell Shock, originally believed to be concussions caused by exploding shells. Men were given a few days R&R then were sent back to the front. By 1918 the condition was called War Strain, and later War Neurosis. Today we call it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Depression, anxiety, flashbacks, egocentric behavior, emotional withdrawal, and addictive behavior are all symptoms. 80,000 cases of "shell shock" were diagnosed during WWI.

Brett and Jake met when he was hospitalized and she was a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment. Women of the middle and upper classes, between the ages of 21 and 48, who wanted to help in the war effort joined the VAD. They worked in primitive circumstances. And they were exposed to gruesome wounds and maimed bodies, suffering and pain, and death. Brett would have understood what her first love had suffered.

The picture came back to me of myself standing alone in a newly created circle of hell during the 'emergency' of March 22, 1918, gazing half hypnotized at the disheveled beds, the stretchers on the floor, the scattered boots and piles of muddy clothing, the brown blankets turned back from smashed limbs bound to splints by filthy bloodstained bandages. Beneath each stinking wad of sodden wool and gauze an obscene horror waited for me and all the equipment that I had for attacking it in this ex-medical ward was one pair of forceps standing in a potted meat glass half full of methylated spirit.
Vera Brittain, describing a field camp hospital in Etaples in 1918

"Funny, how one doesn't mind the blood," Brett says about the bull fights.

Gertrude Stein's famous epitaph "You are all a lost generation" described the cohort generation who reached adulthood during WWI, known as The Lost Generation. Rereading the book, I realized that being lost was not a lack of direction and purpose. This cannon fodder generation was suffering from PTSD, self medicating with alcohol, and fearlessly seeking thrills. They were emotionally impaired, unable to truly connect in any meaningful way. It is pretty to think that true love could save anyone, but we know that if Jake's physical wounds were healed,  Brett's emotional ones would have destroyed any possibility of a happy ending.

Hemingway started the book in 1925 and in 1926 the manuscript was sent to Maxwell Perkins, legendary editor at Scribner who also worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Alan Paton, Erskine Caldwell, and James Jones. Hemingway and Fitzgerald had met in Paris and Hemingway was impressed by The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald offered advice, including careful editing of the opening chapters which are offered in the appendix in this edition. The rewrite reads vastly superior.

The original opening chapter began with Bill and Hem ( Jake) meeting the young bull fighter. Duff (Brett) is with her fiance and cast off lover but is lusting for the bull fighter. Chapter II describes Duff (Brett) as having "had something once" but was pretty much a drunk now. In the final version she was "damned good looking." Her first husband was an abusive drunk who had tried to kill her. She was waiting for the divorce to come through for two years. Hem/Jake was the first person narrator in the original Chapter II.

"I don't know why I have put all this down...but I wanted to show you what a fine crowd we were." from the deleted chapter II

"To understand what happened in Pamplona you must understand the Quarter in Paris." from the deleted chapter II

The original draft ends, "Cohn is the hero." What a different book that would have been. Hem/Jake
as the sidekick to Cohn, like Gatsby's Nick Carraway. (Published in 1925, Nick is also a WWI veteran.)

How men respond to the stuff life throws at them reveals their character. Hemingway uses Brett as the stuff thrown, and her willing victims all react differently. Her fiance Mike makes rude comments, stays drunk, and carries on. Jake finds solace in his work, fishing, and tries to find peace in what little faith he still possess. Jake is a rock in public, but feels like hell in private. Each veteran in the group finds their own way to cope, with alcohol being the main way.

"It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing."

Robert Cohn takes it all very badly, and his comrades, and Brett, get mighty sick of his mooning about. "I hate his damned suffering," Brett tells Jake. Cohn has no war experience. He can't accept that Brett treats what they shared so lightly, and takes on the White Knight role trying to protect her from herself. He does not fit in. His Jewishness becomes an easy slur, but it is really his old fashioned values that set him apart.

Enter Pedro Romano, the bullfighter. He is the most beautiful boy anyone has seen. He has integrity in the ring, not stooping to the showmanship tactics of some bull fighters. He is unsullied and nothing like these Lost Generation men. Brett can't help but be attracted to this boy who stands for everything she has lost. She feels 'a bitch' and knows she will ruin him but still goes off with him. They are followed by Cohn, the boxer.

The novel is almost 100 years old! Today we may snicker at Brett's dilemma, we know there 'are ways' to overcome Jake's limitations. We abhor bull fighting and the mistreatment of animals. But do not underestimate the novel's relevance to today's problems. War still maims our sons and daughters. During WWI shell shocked men were ostracized as slackers, even shot by their own generals. Today we evade responsibility for treatment. There is nothing new under the sun. A generation comes, a generation goes, the sun rises and the sun sets, and we still send our youth into war and they still return to us wounded.

The e-book I was given access to read is part of The Hemingway Library Edition from Scribner. Supplements include early drafts and deleted chapters and prefaces by Hemingway's son Patrick and grandson Sean. It will be published July 15.