2022 August Blog
By Chuck Peek
Greeley Colorado Archives, Hemingway Conference in Sheridan Wyoming and Cooke City Montana, visit with Jan Blackburn in Billings—Rocky Mountains, Big Horn Mountains, Galatin Mountains—Mount Republic and Mount Amphitheater, Beartooth Pass, and a bit of Yellowstone and the Black Hills
Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone River where Hemingway fished
With apologies to those who have seen some of this, here are the Highs and Lows—and the dizzying trip between:
Lows first, to get them out of the way and balance them with some not-so-lows:
Greeley History Museum
Trinity Church, where my grandparent’s priest had called them “the Nobility of Trinity Church,” welcomed our memorabilia about the family connection…great visit with Rev. Lisa Musser, the current Rector there—Grandparents, aunt and uncle, my parents all married there, I was baptized there, my dad was ordained there, etc. But, not the same story at the Greeley History Museum—four bags of scrapbooks, photo albums, newspaper clippings, etc—they took maybe a dozen items. Very nice archivist JoAnna Stull was interested and wanted more, but the Curator seemed less than interested. Part of her problem is, no doubt, lack of staff to process what they take…Stull was apologetic. I plan to write up a brief history with some photos and see if they want that and then much of the memorabilia will become something our children will have to keep or toss. GHM did recommend a Colorado site that might be interested in a little of it, so there’s that.
Greeley itself
This a bit unfair, but the years take their toll on the sites of one’s memories. Greeley has grown so large that much of the old is gone. Found some addresses connected to my childhood, finally located the Glenmere lake that my grandfather stocked with fish and ducks, but the major sites, such as the Toggery where my mother worked as a girl, the Canfield Hotel and its dining room, the old Long’s Peak Café, are gone. Directions always eluded me, even as a child there, and they still elude me today, a real disadvantage in our times, when so many venues are in outlying malls rather that in the city center. We stopped by Greeley High School, where my aunt, her oldest daughter, and my mother all graduated—and it looked pretty roughly used and in all the office areas not a soul was to be found. A coach we’d bumped into at the Greeley History Museum was pretty sure they would want the copies of the ’24, ’25, and ’26 annuals we brought along—hope so, we left them with a note on a desk in the main office area. On the other hand, there are lots of funky modern aspects in the new Greeley—mainly restaurants that didn’t disappoint—how could peanut butter/bacon sandwich or guacamole and chips not be good? Santeramos, Lucky Finn’s, Rio Grande, Cow Saloon…all worth the stop
Glenmere, Greeley, Colorado, where the birds and fish today are offspring of those Doc Urie put there and where Chuck Peek caught his first fish
The latest Hemingway Society “In Memoriam” 2018-2022
So many gone, so many who launched the Hemingway Society or were Hemingway’s close companions across his life: Jim Brasch, “Dink” Bruce, Rose Marie Burwell, Brewster Chamberlain, Scott Donaldson, Ralph Glidden, Peter Hays, Donald Junkins, Dennis Ledden, George Monteiro, Jenny Phillips, James Sterling Sanford, Stoney Stoneback, and Raul Villareal.
H. R. Stoneback in Paris
The Poetry Un-Reading, or A New Meaning to “Misreading”
I’d been invited to read at the Hemingway Conference with its conference director Larry Grimes, one of the last of the original Hemingway Society founders and a great guy/poet/scholar, along with Valerie Hemingway who in 1959 at the age of 20 became EH’s secretary and stayed on for some years after his death to help Mary sort out all the files. In my mind, the reading was set for the last night of the conference, so the night before I went to our cabin in Silvergate, Montana, and prepared my reading. At about 10:30, the reading prepared, I sorted through a few papers I’d no longer need, including a copy of the email inviting me, which said in BOLD print that—the reading was that night. I’d missed it. I don’t know when I’ve felt so lost and low—a miserable night, finally getting to sleep around 4 in the morning. Loss is always hard; when it stems from sheer stupidity, even harder. When it is an overdue comeuppance to one’s ego, even harder still. But—for the redeeming factors, see the “High’s” below.
Post-trip low: those nice folks in Wyoming went nuts of primary election day.
Highs
The Missed Reading Revisited
Because I didn’t show up for the reading, there was a 20-minute time slot to fill—and wonderfully it was filled by the students of the late H. R. Stoneback and his granddaughter reading from Stoney’s poetry. The next day, they told me it was cathartic for them, and others told me how much their reading had meant…we are all missing Stoney a lot and it was just the right touch. Stoney’s students were almost always as much a presence at conferences as Stoney himself. He was devoted to them in ways few teachers are…taking student entourages all over the world. He and I joked once about how much more students had meant to us than our associations with many of our colleagues . . . but that’s another story that trace clear back to my own teachers.
In his “Remembering” piece for the latest Hemingway Review, Steve Paul recalled, “Stoney, a bearded hulk of a presence, had begun using a wheelchair . . . and it was always poignant and at times startling to watch his posse of students from the State University of New York-New Paltz carry him in his chair down a steep stone stairway in the town or up and down the steps of” the boat that took us all across Lake Maggiore. Only “posse” is not quite the right word—it was more a ‘beloved community.’ On that same boat, I ran into Stoney’s beloved wife Sparrow at the other end of the boat from where the Stoneback coterie were perched on the bow. She said, I wandered off and am not sure how to get back to them, so we walked back together through the crowd, talking all the way until she just dissolved back into the community of scholars and students, taking a seat between Stoney and Allen Jacobs for the rest of the journey back to Stresa.
Also a high: had the best talk I’ve ever had with Valerie…Donald Junkins (also just recently deceased) had introduced me to her up at the Big Two-Hearted River in 2012 and I was able to give her not only a copy of my latest book but a photo of Donald and her taken at that time…and what pleasure to meet some of Stoney’s last students—more about this in the note on the reading I would have given that closes this (below)—skip it if the poetry doesn’t interest you.
The 2022 (first scheduled for 2020, then 2021) Hemingway Conference
Reading Hemingway’s “Wines of Wyoming,” much of which is conversations rendered in French, one scholar got hold of a translator for help. The translator told him, “Before I could translate his French into English, I first had to translate it into French!”
Some conferences treat their subject like idols. Alternately, some seem to enjoy denigrating the author and the writing that brings them together. Hemingway was a wonderful writer. Faulkner told Truman Capote that he could bet that if Hemingway wrote something it was written as well as it could be. But Hemingway was also a conflicted man—both perpetually unhappy and perpetually joyful. Valerie Hemingway said she has never known someone who greeted people and situations with greater joy and exuberance. He could also be cruel, boastful, and his own worst enemy. This conference saw clouds from both sides now, got all of that just about right.
There turned out to be an arc to it, a trajectory owed of course to its contributors but also to its planners, including Larry Grimes, Chris Warren, and one of my favorites, Ross Tangedal…no one can play devil’s advocate better than Ross.
In the opening first session of the conference, my former student Eric Reed led off with a paper insisting on a close look at particulars, and he was joined in that by an independent scholar/high school teacher and two seasoned Hemingway scholars (David Anderson, Russ Pottle, and John Beall), all also anchoring their papers with a sharp ear for details. In the closing session with writers Chris Warren, Philip Greene, and Valerie Hemingway—a session about weeding out true and false biographies—Valerie and her cohort again insisted on “close reading” of the actual writing.
Eric Reed and his family at the Hemingway life-size at Sheridan College
If you’ve followed the vagaries of academic preoccupations over the years, you’ll know this seemed like a grand restoration of what real literary scholarship should be about.
In between there were exemplary moments of that discipline—among them Larry Grime’s paper on “Indian Camp” addressing the doctor’s remarks to Nick about the screams of the Ojibwe woman undergoing a Caesarian without anesthetic—her screams don’t matter. But, Larry asked, don’t they? Isn’t that in fact the problem? Isn’t that why there are over 5000 abducted, kidnapped, raped Native women every year? Doesn’t the text itself involve the reader in how and why the screams do matter?
Similarly, Suzanne del Gizzo and Carl Eby took on Garden of Eden, again with focus on its particulars, and their work will change my reading of that novel forever. So will A Martinez’s reading of the short story “Wines of Wyoming”—a reading done with an actor’s skill and a reader’s insight into nuances I’d pretty much missed. Maybe bad me, but first rate A Martinez—just as we knew him in Longmire. His presentation took place along with Craig Johnson, who was insightful, entertaining, and enjoyable in both his presentations. Tim Christian’s portrayal of Mary Hemingway was excellently done—full of insights and revelations and you could see beyond his book and his talk a fine mind at work. A legal mind, so, as with my son, hope for lawyers! Tim Penner’s take on portrayals of Hemingway in film was both delightful and informative—recalling Papa’s injunction to develop a “good crap detector.”
Perhaps the most moving of all the panels, however, were two that addressed place, especially wild place. Rick McIntyre on “the Wolves of Lamar Valley,” Stephen Brown on “Hemingway in Wolf Country,” and Susanne Clark on the influence of Teddy Roosevelt on Hemingway—all told poignant stories, each showing some of the genius of Hemingway as both person and writer.
One iconic moment stands out: when Mike Koryta (Those Who Wish Me Dead) was introduced, the moderator reminded the audience that when Mike threw out the ball at Yankee Stadium, he declined the Yankee cap offered him and wore, instead, his Cooke City cap. Mike led our group hike up (I mean pretty straight up—400 steps:400 feet—up to Silver Falls.
Silver Falls from pretty close up, just above Silvergate and Montana’s Range Rider Lodge
We couldn’t get to all the sessions, of course, but of the many we went to none disappointed. Lots of good insights, close readings, by for instance Stephen Frech, Marcos Norris, Suzanne Clark, and Kaori Fairbanks.
Many thanks to Hemingway society regulars and officers—Carl Eby, Susanne del Gizzo, Kirk Curnutt, and others.
Addendum: The Reading that Wasn’t to Be, Or God Knew that, If He Asked Me to Step Aside, I Wouldn’t Have, So He Didn’t Bother to Ask
I first met H. R. “Stoney” Stoneback at the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. Stoney was already tired of academics who put down Hemingway and it wasn’t long before he gravitated to one of the great loves of the rest of his life: Hemingway and Hemingway studies.
It was in a conversation in Oxford, Mississippi, that I mentioned my early love of Hemingway. I’d graduated high school feeling terribly ignorant and decided I had to do something about it, that something being to read all of Steinbeck (about the only writer’s name I knew) the summer before college and all of Hemingway the summer after my first college year. Stoney encouraged me to get back to Hemingway and to look for opportunities to get together with other Hemingway readers and scholars. The first opportunity to do that was in the Conference at Les Saintes Maries, France.
Weather delays on our flights put us into Paris late, so it was long dark when we arrived in Les Saintes Maries, dark enough we couldn’t see the sign on the motel door telling us our room was open and we could check in the next day. We scrambled to find a place that late at night, woke the next morning, and arrived in town just in time to see Stoney and his students at the pier and the Gypsy Pilgrimage—some say the second largest in Europe—sailing into shore. The pilgrimage commemorates the landing of the three saints, the three Mary’s, fleeing persecution in Jerusalem, and upon landing with effigies of the saints, it proceeds to the basilica of St. John Baptist. About the middle of the ensuing week, lots of us got ourselves up the rickety stairs of that basilica to the roof where Stoney and Donald Junkins read poetry, some of Don’s reflecting his sense of China. We all sat on the slant of the roof, they stood on a level space by the wall, and we could see the city and trees beyond them as they read, and as they read the chatter of the gathering fell away and a mystical feeling seemed to grip us all.
Here is a poem I wrote some years later to capture the moment:
Tapestries
For H. R. Stoneback and Donald Junkins
Poets weave worlds once unwoven,
Mend together metaphors from tatters,
Like these two poets, perched atop the basilica,
Hemming way into the afternoon,
Stitching threads of China into French cloth,
Their gypsy art looming over the relics below.
At the Ranger Rider Lodge in Silvergate, Montana, a display of Hemingway photos and memorabilia set up by Chris Warren featured an old typewriter…until I saw it, I had never thought of one reason why so many people pecked at the keys with one finger of each hand—that keyboard is narrower than most keyboards today on pads and computers.
By the time of the conference in Malaga and Ronda, I’d been exchanging poems with Stoney from time to time, and he asked if I would read along with him and Don—the venue was the long back porch of one of the inns from which you could see the hillside beyond. For that occasion, my memory reached back to the Camargue, the marshland around Les Saintes Maries, where the black bulls share standing among the tall grass of the marsh with the white horses and pink flamingoes, and I wrote this poem:
Body Piercing
A coral-orange flamingo pinks
In the sunlight on a marsh,
Struts among its tall grass,
One leg at a time
In the shallow water. Up.
Down.
Like the pump on a windmill
Occasionally catching the breeze,
Like a man tapping at a typewriter
With one finger of each hand,
Drawing words from a well of memory,
His other fingers
Pressing his palms, feeling for where
The wounds should be.
The patchwork of the fields and hedgerows we saw behind the three of us reading poems in Ronda is sometimes considered to be one of the possible origins of cubism itself, a perfect setting for commemorating the life and work of a writer so much in touch with and influenced by the evolving phases of modernist art. Its various techniques helped shape not only Hemingway’s style but his sense of himself and the world around him—its joys and disappointments, glories and tragedies, elements he was so adept at using to create the dynamic of his work. I’d been thinking about that dynamic for some time, its presence felt in so many stories and novels, the arc from his exuberance to depression and back. That reflection had informed another poem I read in Ronda:
And in our next broadcast, we’ll tell you what weather you can expect tomorrow
I.
You have to admit, the fellow knew his weather.
Christ, but didn’t the little rains down rain.
Sometimes sitting in your room,
Watching the green blur of the trees
Through the rain on your window,
You find yourself missing his rain, probably wishing
You were in your lover’s arms again, instead.
Then he takes you off drinking your way South
Toward Spain, and you forget all about her.
You can taste it,
Whatever it is that’s been set out in the basket by the river
Or on the nickel-plated bar,
All of it, as it so rarely is: clean, light, and fine.
It’s all The Garden, still growing green as you remember it,
And you, there, not minding being naked at all,
Until it rains on the make-believe,
And you suddenly see your own reflection in the pooling puddles,
And realize how alone you have so quickly become.
II.
If there’s no idea but in things, then you can think rain.
Or snow. He knew, too, his snows, this weatherman
Of the weather that always arrives in a later broadcast.
Rising peaks of snows, white elephant sales of snows,
Falling from somewhere up there like aspirations suddenly glimpsed,
You hiking the long way up there, skiing the quick way down
Across snows white as death,
Sepulchers of the fossil record of your desires,
A record you aren’t quite sure how to read,
Just as it is hard to know what to make of those snows,
Or what they make of you,
But reading them somehow dampening your appetite
For the next chorus of a Crosby Christmas.
III.
The bells of St. Mary may not have tolled for thee
But be assured that there’s a bell that does,
Tolls, and tolling tells the tale,
Damned beautiful, of course, but tolling none the less,
Echoes remembered at the edge of a very short story,
Disturbing the distance as you stand marveling
At the smooth stones in the creek, formed by eons of pressure,
Recalling the hands lifting the bread, the cup,
The gifts of ages of grace,
Sensing in the stones something sacred in the names of things.
You and your sons and daughters after you perhaps,
Parade across your own pages,
While the Catherines and Francises parade across theirs,
Something indefinite in his style
Situating them as possibly themselves, possibly him,
And either way the distant peal reminding you
How dangerous it is to imitate a style
That leads across the river to Idaho, the voice of the guide
Growing fainter, fumbling now for the words:
Listen, you bastards, this ain’t no goddamn Garden of Eden.
There was one more poem I’d planned to read, a poem that reached into my fascination with the art of A Farewell to Arms (AFTA), as good a novel I think as The Sun Also Rises, the two novels worthy of standing between In Our Time and A Moveable Feast. In AFTA we find the twin screws of the boat that was Hemingway’s “confessional” art—the meticulous attention to and accuracy with details and the elusive reticence that required the reader to imagine the other seven-eighths of the iceberg…in this case the details of Frederick and Catherine rowing across the lake and the reticence of the bedroom scenes. I tried to imagine how those two scenes might have resonated in the writer’s mind. The result was this poem:
Lake Maggiore, or where there is no me
when you first set your boat
in my water
awkward as always in the launching
your arms reaching down either side
braced on both wales
legs straddling, feet seeking purchase
the rippling began across the surface
from the moving
oars, their furrowing rhythms
till the water gave way to the boat
entirely
displacement the measure of boats in water
of the smooth, harsh, intruding launch
the motion that thrusts them forward
all that lets them return at last
not sinking, buoyant for return
perhaps to row again
these waters at night
Larry Grimes had suggested a twenty-minute limit to our readings but noted we might want a poem or two in reserve. The poem I kept in reserve went back to the Camargue, to Les Saintes Maries, to the place which so embodies the angels on the head of the pin, myth hovering over and infusing geography, the way nature and something, for lack of a better word the supernatural, flow into one another. I gave a copy of the poem to Stephen Brown, whose own presentations at the conference delved into the same depths, the same mystery. I’ll end with that poem:
Taurus: The Arena
You said I would find the Camargue a place I could believe in.
Perhaps that is why, today, watching from across the marsh,
I find I can imagine that life itself, even our own,
Once descended from brave black bulls.
I wouldn’t ask where in their Eden the bulls found mates,
Any more than a Southern Baptist would ask where Eve
Found mates for her boys,
Those boys that, after all, I am saying,
Were made after the likeness of these bulls,
Stamped from these most ancient of images,
Snorted into being by their breath.
Because here I find myself believing
There must be someplace where what we need
Is found in time, where supply is serendipitous,
Where pink flamingoes appear in the festal season,
Acolytes at the con-celebration of the baptisms
Of those born where land and marsh and sea
Know no boundaries.
Whatever you admire in them, the bulls, not the boys,
You do not find it strange to imagine
How the race of white horses came from some other story,
Came here to tame from the bulls enough wildness
To suit them to rituals of necessity
Where theirs would be the blood for the cup of trembling,
That outpoured blood common to all places
Where two stories converge.
Les Saintes Maries, France
April 1998
The “you” alluded to in the opening line was, of course, Stoney!
**
Next Blog will be in September—sometime after Nancy’s Birthday and before we train to be Poll Workers
Mt. Amphitheater, view from Ranger Rider Lodge, Silvergate
Kearney, Nebraska
August 2022
capeek 