By Stephen Alexander

               A meme circulating social media shows a wedding photo of pop superstar Dua Lipa and actor Callum Turner. The caption reads, “Everything I ask God for, He triples and gives to Dua Lipa.” The joke is that it is preposterous to consider just how glamorous Dua Lipa’s life appears.

               I found myself pondering that meme while considering an op-ed requesting that Nobel Prize Laureate Ernest Hemingway be reconsidered as a nature writer. Some of the world’s best biographers have spilled copious amounts of ink contemplating Hemingway’s life and work. Does the most lionized writer in American letters truly need another title bestowed upon him over a century after he first began publishing?

Decidedly not. But the ecological threats our planet faces are unprecedented. In the face of warming seas killing off fish and human encroachment killing wildlife, there has never been a greater need for an appreciation of nature. There are brilliant and popular nature writers, like Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Rachel Carson. But the genre is often niche, stuffed away in the back of independent bookstores. Hemingway’s work continues to be wildly popular decades after his death. And much is lost from the pedagogy of nature writing without recognizing Hemingway within the genre alongside its other titans. Truly, everything mortal writers ask God for, He triples and gives to Ernest Hemingway.

               I first encountered Hemingway when I was 17 years old. On a rainy summer day, I pulled out my mother’s beat-to-hell paperback copy of The Nick Adams Stories (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972). I randomly opened the book to “Big Two-Hearted River.” The story first published in the collection In Our Time (Boni & Liveright, 1925) told the tale of Nick Adams returning to northern Michigan following World War I. The war is never mentioned as Nick walks the burned-over landscape to fish the Big-Two Hearted River.

The story, if one can even call it a story, is Capital ‘D’ Dull. Very, very little happens. It is just Nick Adams and the fish and the landscape.

I was mesmerized.

In a story long enough that it is broken into two parts, Hemingway’s description of nature is utterly captivating. At 17-years-old, without even knowing what nature writing was, I read passages in Two-Hearted like, “The river was there. It swirled against the log spiles of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins.” And I knew that I had touched the face of my literary god. Decades later, I have come to realize that my idol was one of America’s most talented nature writers.

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               Hemingway came to love nature honestly. He grew up at the turn of the 20^th century in Oak Park, Illinois, a wealthy suburb of Chicago. When the Midwest heat became unbearable, the Hemingways would travel to northern Michigan and Windemere, the family cottage on Walloon Lake. Hemingway spent the summers of his childhood outside, running through the woods barefoot, swimming in the frigid lake, camping, hunting, fishing and, once he got a little older, drinking and raising hell.

               Hemingway’s father, Clarence, was a physician who instilled a love of science, nature and outdoor sport in his son.

               While Hemingway famously lived in Paris during the roaring 20s, much of his life was spent residing in and traveling to some of the most beautiful country on Earth including his house in Key West, Florida, and his African safaris.

               Eerily, some of Hemingway’s most captivating descriptions of nature came from posthumous books published after his suicide in 1961.

               In Islands in the Stream (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), Hemingway writes this of the weather in Bimini, “Sometimes the summers were too hot when the wind dropped in August or when the trade winds sometimes failed in June and July. Hurricanes, too, might come in September and October and even in early November and there could be freak tropical storms any time from June on. But the true hurricane months have fine weather when there are no storms.”

               While Stream is a work of fiction, True at First Light (Scribner, 1999)recounts an African safari and is classified as nonfiction, though, there are some questions about liberties Hemingway may have taken with the truth. Regardless, from a narrative perspective, Light is atrocious. Whatever narrative there was in Light, though, it allowed for breathtaking passages like, “In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plane. You have walked across that plane in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.”

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               Hemingway’s nature writing is capable of more than just painting a portrait of weather patterns and landscape. His work veered often into conservationism. As a lifelong sportsman, it was imperative to Hemingway that the animal world he loved so well be preserved. The idea of a sportsman and a conservationist may feel discordant, but Hemingway lived by his own code as a hunter.

               “I did not mind killing anything,” Hemingway writes in Hills, “any animal, if I killed it cleanly, they all had to die and my interference with the nightly and the seasonal killing that went on all the time was very minute and I had no guilty feeling at all. We ate the meat and kept the hides and horns.”

               That same code applied to fishing. In Two-Hearted,Hemingway writes both tenderly and scientifically of the care that Nick Adams knew had to be taken with even small trophies:“He had wet his hand before he touched the trout, so he would not disturb the delicate mucus that covered him. If a trout was touched with a dry hand, a white fungus attacked the unprotected spot.”

               Hemingway’s love of outdoor sport even made him an accidental figure in the world of taxonomy. While deep sea fishing on his boat, The Pilar, in the Gulf Stream in the 1930s, Hemingway became convinced that the blue, white, black and striped marlin he caught were distinct species rather than the same species with varying colors. Hemingway’s work with ichthyologists at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia helped advance the scientific understanding of billfish and the reclassification of different North Atlantic marlins.

               Hemingway brought his keen eye for the differences and variations of animals to the page. Describing a rhino in Hills, he wrote, “There he was, long-hulked, heavy-sided, prehistoric looking, the hide like vulcanized rubber and faintly transparent looking, scarred with a badly healed horn wound that the birds had pecked at, his tail thick, round, and pointed, flat many-legged ticks crawling on him, his ears fringed with hair, tiny pig eyes, moss growing on the base of his horn that grew out forward from his nose.”

               Hemingway was even more surgically beautiful in his description of fish, especially in his exquisite novella The Old Man and the Sea (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952).

“He was a very big Mako shark built to swim as fast as the fastest fish in the sea and everything about him was beautiful except his jaws.” Hemingway writes. “His back was as blue as a sword fish’s and his belly was silver and his hide was smooth and handsome. He was built as a sword fish except for his huge jaws which were tight shut now as he swam fast, just under the surface with his high dorsal fin knifing through the water without wavering. Inside the closed double lip of his jaws all of his eight rows of teeth were slanted inwards. They were not the ordinary pyramid-shaped teeth of most sharks. They were shaped like a man’s fingers when they are crisped like claws. They were nearly as long as the fingers of the old man and they had razor-sharp cutting edges on both sides. This was a fish built to feed on all the fishes in the sea, that were so fast and strong and well armed that they had no other enemy.”

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The counterargument against considering Hemingway as a nature writer, of course, is that he was a writer of fiction. But he was also a writer of nonfiction. And even so, nature writing has always used narrative and imagination. Nature writing without narrative is poetry. It is the narrative that allows the nature writer to break free of the grammatical shackles that frame poetry.

In Two-Hearted, Hemingway uses Nick Adams as a fictionalized version of himself. Through the character, Hemingway shows the reader the beauty of northern Michigan. Carson took the same creative liberties in Under the Sea Wind using Scomber, the mackerel, and Anguilla, the eel, as anthropomorphiccharacters to set up her descriptions of nature.

There is perhaps no greater argument for considering Hemingway as a nature writer than his Foreword in Green Hills of Africa where he wrote, “The writer has attempted to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month’s action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination.”

What is nature writing if not truly writing the shape of a country?

               Perhaps the ultimate cliché in writing is that writers should write what they know. Hemingway knew many things. He knew about living in the suburbs of Chicago and the urban splendor of Paris. He knew about spending time in the natural worlds of Northern Michigan, Africa and the Gulf Stream. He knew how to drink and fight. He knew how to convince four women to marry him, though not how to keep them married to him. Hemingway, one of history’s most famous suicides, also knew very well of sadness and despair.

               Perhaps as much as anything, though, Hemingway knew about nature.

               While The Old Man and the Sea can be considered Hemingway’s most famous title, I would argue that For Whom the Bell Tolls (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940) is his magnum opus. I would further argue that Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the only book in American letters equal to Hemingway’s brilliant novel of the Spanish Civil War.

               It should not be surprising that Hemingway opened his masterpiece not with the action of war, but with nature writing:

“He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass.”

There is no evidence that Hemingway ever referred to himself as a nature writer. But who knows what Papa might have told his drinking buddies after an eighth daiquiri. In considering Hemingway as a nature writer, though, there is much to be learned from this passage in Death in the Afternoon (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932):

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.”

               In the years since I first read The Nick Adams Stories, I have traveled the world. I have found myself walking through the woods of northern Michigan, lying on the ground in the Spanish countryside, swimming in the Gulf Stream and looking at a rhino in the African bush. It always felt as if I was living each of those experiences for the second time. The first time I lived those moments was when I read the work of a nature writer named Ernest Hemingway.