Hemingway, the Preservation Impulse, and Cultural Geography

Abstract

Godfrey discusses Ernest Hemingway as a cultural geographer, tying his literary aesthetic to the field of humanist geography and investigating in particular the way that Hemingway’s literary places are forms of historical and emotional preservation. She points out that, in a very real sense, much of Hemingway’s writing—beginning with the earliest Nick Adams stories—represents his impulse to preserve forever the places he once knew and loved. As Hemingway moved on from place to place throughout his life, out of Paris, Spain, Key West, Cuba, and Idaho (even if he was leaving a place and intending to return), he was in a sense forcing his own displacement, a displacement that awakened his creative energies.

For virtue seeks no other reward for its labours and its dangers

beyond that of praise and renown; and if that be denied to it,

what reason is there, O judges, why in so small and brief a course of life

as is allotted to us, we should impose such labours on ourselves?

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, Speech for Archias the Poet

Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong,

My love shall in my verse ever live young.

—Shakespeare, Sonnet 19