Pip-Pip to Hemingway in Something from Marge

By Georganna Main

Marge Bump met Ernest Hemingway for the first time during the summer of 1915. She was walking back from Hortons Creek in northern Michigan where she had caught her first fish; he was a handsome sixteen-year-old who invited Marge to troll for rainbow trout. And so began a friendship between a young Hemingway and a freckled teenage girl that would extend throughout the famous authors lifetime.

Some ninety-five years later, Georgianna Main, daughter of Marge Bump, chronicles her mothers recollections of her friendship with Hemingway through letters, photos, and conversations that shed light on previously unrevealed events that occurred during Hemingways early life. Through her own insights and observations, Marge provides a captivating interpretation of both her real-life friendship with Hemingway and the fictionalized relationship between Marge and Nick Adams presented in Hemingways classic story The End of Something.

Pip-Pip to Hemingway in Something from Marge is a profile of innocence and youth in northern Michigan, where a creek and a trout bring a young girl and boy together in an unforgettable friendship.

A fascinating book for all Hemingway aficionados
--H. R. Stoneback, Professor, Department of English, the State University of New York

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450236799

Georganna Main

Georgianna Main, the daughter of Hemingway's fictional character and real-life friend Marge, is an alumna of Mount Holyoke College and Cornell University. A retired educator, she lives in Carmel, California, where she enjoys her view of the rocks and the sea as well as literature, poetry, art, and tennis.

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Copyright © 2010 front cover design: Georgianna Main.

Copyright © 2010 Pip-Pip to Hemingway in Something From Marge: Copyright © April 2, 2010 by Georgianna Main. Registration number: TXu 1-647-932. Register of Copyrights, United States of` America, Library of Congress, United States Copyright Office, 101 Independence Avenue SE, Washington, D. C. 20559-6000.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-3678-2 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-3679-9 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 3/17/11

Hemingway letter of July 21, 1921, to Grace Quinlan, pp. 51–52: Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters, 1917–1961, edited by Carlos Baker. Copyright outside of the United States:

© Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust.

Source of Ernest Hemingway’s letter, dated July 21, 1921, to Grace Quinlan: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut.

Selections from Summer People. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright outside of the United States:

© Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust.

Selections from The End of Something and The Three-Day Blow: Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright 1925 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright renewed 1953 by Ernest Hemingway.

Selections from The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The First 49 Stories, published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

Unpublished draft of undated letter from Ernest Hemingway to Marjorie Bump: Copyright © 2010. Printed with the permission of The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and is used with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., on behalf of the Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust. Copyright outside of the United States: © Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust. All rights reserved.

Unpublished letters of Ernest Hemingway to Miss Biggs, Jim Gamble, and reprinted letter to Grace Quinlan: Copyright © 2010. Printed with the permission of The Ernest Hemingway Foundation and are used with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., on behalf of the Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust. Copyright outside of the United States: © Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust.

SKU-000168690_TEXT.pdfSKU-000168690_TEXT.pdf

In loving memory of my mother, Lucy Marjorie Bump,

known as Marge by family, friends,

and Nick Adams in Hemingway fiction

I am certain of nothing

but the holiness of the heart’s affections

and the truth of the imagination.

—John Keats

Contents

FOREWORD

I. PREFACE

II. INTRODUCTION

III. Remembering Hemmey

IV. COMMUNICATING WITH LETTERS

V. WRITING FROM ERN/HEMMEY/STEIN

VI. PHOTOGRAPHS OF SUMMER PEOPLE

VII. DRAWING PERSPECTIVES

VIII. SEARCHING FOR TRUTH

IX. CREATING A PERFECT CAMEO

ENDNOTES

APPENDIX: Places, dates and events

PERMISSIONS/ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FOREWORD

This is a fascinating book for all readers who are interested in the complex relationship between fact and fiction, history and storytelling. This is also an important book for all Hemingway aficionados, especially those engaged by Hemingway’s depiction of Northern Michigan in his fiction. Millions of readers, for example, are familiar with his classic early story, The End of Something, which deals with the relationship between his protagonist Nick Adams and a character named Marge. It is difficult to believe that it will soon be a century since this story first appeared in print [in The Nick Adams Stories, first published in 1925.] It is also hard to believe that so much misreading and confusion have entered the record of the facts––the friendship of the actual Marge Bump and Ernest Hemingway––and the interpretation of the fictional relationship of Marge and Nick. It is indeed a tangled web that is woven when biographers present ostensible history filtered through a piece of fiction and then present as biography erroneous and misleading readings of both the fact and the fiction. In turn, literary critics attempting to interpret the fiction rely too much on the misleading biographies––and so the cycle goes. Biographers and literary critics are supposed to know better than to blend indiscriminately fact and fiction, history and story.

This book, with its unique perspective, will help to set the record straight. Two decades ago I addressed the tangled record of fact and fiction in regard to The End of Something in a conference paper presented in Northern Michigan and an essay published in a volume of Hemingway in Michigan studies (Nothing is Ever Lost: Another look at that Marge Business.) One unexpected result of that venture into literary criticism was my contact and friendship with the actual Marge’s cousin, Bill Ohle, historian and author of a book about Horton Bay, the Michigan village that is the setting of Hemingway’s fiction. Another unexpected result was that the author of this book contacted me and, for more than a decade, we corresponded intermittently about what I had christened That Marge Business. She sent me early drafts of portions of this book and I encouraged her to persevere with her important project. Now we have in hand the result of her perseverance, and it is both a uniquely compelling testimony by a family member, and a biographical enterprise based on study of Hemingway archival documents and historical materials available only to the author. In this volume, Georgie Main has admirably done her part to ensure that Nothing is Ever Lost. This is a book that belongs on the shelves of all Hemingway scholars and students; and it should be read by everyone interested in the complicated relationship between fact and fiction.

H. R. Stoneback

Distinguished Professor, The State University of New York

Department of English

SUNY, New Paltz

New Paltz, N. Y. 12561

I. PREFACE

I researched this book in the special Hemingway Room at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Columbia Point, Boston, Massachusetts. This necessitated browsing through materials in the Ernest Hemingway Collection, where my mother’s letters reside among hundreds of other letters which Hemingway received, cherished, and chose to save.

The Hemingway Room is a comfortable, cozy, inviting place occupying five hundred feet of space on the fourth floor. It was designed as an archives tower by the architect I. M. Pei. The large picture windows overlook the beautiful skyline of Boston Harbor. At the dedication of this room in 1980, Director Dan Fenn said, Tonight we unite Art with Politics under one roof as a tangible and permanent reminder of President Kennedy’s conviction that neither is whole and true without the other.

One wall of the room is lined with shelves and glass cases for books, such as The Old Man and the Sea, containing handwritten notes penciled in the margins. Other shelves hold boxes and catalogued files of hundreds of letters that Hemingway chose to save. The ones from Hemingway to other people are arranged chronologically and include letters to friends, wives, army buddies, Red Cross ambulance drivers, editors, family members, publishers, authors, and newspaper associates. The letters from others to Hemingway are arranged alphabetically in separate files.

As you enter the Hemingway Room, your immediate attention is drawn to a large lion skin trophy rug. The lion’s head has a wild-eyed, menacing face with tongue protruding. Two easy chairs are covered in a blue and white colonial print. A matching sofa faces a massive old-fashioned wood trunk with the name HEMINGWAY painted in bold red letters. The trunk is covered with a glass top