Sweetgrass and Smoke (review)

102 · THE HEMINGWAY REVIEW Urdu or Hindi. Remembering that the crucial reason for Hemingway's success was his accessibility to ordinary people, I would have liked to know how much—if any—of Hemingway 'has been translated into Bangla, Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil, or the other regional Indian languages . Ultimately, after all, our most strenuous academic efforts to facilitate Hemingway Studies would be as naught without the strong instinctive attraction that so many common readers feel for his work. —Earl Rovit, C.U.N.Y., retired Sweetgrass and Smoke. By Constance Cappel. Xlibris Corporation, 2000. 264 pp. Paper $22. When the Hemingwayfamily summered in the northern lower peninsula of Michigan in the early 1900s, the family occasionally hired a young Native American girk, Prudence Boulton,to assistwith some basic familytasks, such as baby sitting and house cleaning. A few years younger than Ernest, the young woman apparently made an impression on the future writer since he probably employed her as a character in two NickAdams stories,"Ten Indians "and"Fathers andSons."Theprimaryfocus ofConstance Cappel'sbook, Sweetgrass and Smoke, is to reflect on how Prudence Boulton was treated by Hemingwayinhis life and in his fiction. The secondaryfocus is on the plight ofthe Indians inMichigan inthe 19thandearly20th centuries. For several years, Constance Cappel tells us in her book's preface, she has been struck by Prudence Boulton's tragic life. The young girl died in February 1918 in a double suicide pact with an ex-convict named Richard or Jim Castle. She may have been pregnant at the time of her death. Boulton is buried in an unmarked grave in the Greensky Church cemetery on Susan Lake in northern Michigan. Cappel is certainly a writer who should be prepared for biographical detective work since she published in the early 1960s Hemingway in Michigan , a book often consulted by those who wish to find locations and identify possible real-life models Used in Hemingway's Michigan stories. Cappel says in her preface that her book is "an attempt to create in the printed form the story of Ernest and Prudence set in a historical, cultural, the Hemingway review, vol. 22. no. 2, spring 2003. Copyright © 2003 The Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Published by the University ofIdaho Press, Moscow, Idaho. BOOK REVIEWS · 103 and a timeline experiment." To accomplish this she provides excerpts, some just a page long, others quite lengthy, from her own earlier book, as well as from works by other writers, such as Andrew S. Blackbird and his 19th century History ofthe Ottawa and Chippewa Indians ofMichigan, and Peter Griffin's biography of the young Hemingway, Along with Youth. The major segment, however, is Cappel's fictional romantic narrative about the relationship between a wealthy white man and a young Indian girl. The book is divided into chapters, but the presentation is non-traditional , with excerpts from the longer pieces interspersed with the shorter works, and with Cappel's fictional narrative. Cappel calls this collection a "post modern. . .multi-faceted document," a "verbal collage ofthe truth." The book argues that Hemingway slighted Prudence Boulton by placing her in sexually explicit scenes in his stories. Herningway did refer to her later in life as supplying his coming-of-age sexual initiation, but few biographers believe this. Whether the real Prudence Boulton was identical to the two characters in the short stories (Prudie in "Ten Indians" and Trudy in "Fathers and Sons") is also conjectural. Carlos Baker says in the biography that "Ernest's fictional accounts of sexual initiation with Prudy Boulton were more likely the product of wishful thinking than of fact." The majority of the biographies agree that Nick Adams's experiences are not parallel with factual events in the author's life, although in the case of Prudence Boulton, we\;ould blame the author himselffor suggesting as much. Besides its experimental structure, Sweetgrass and Smoke also contains a ?µp?eGofexperimental spellings. For example, Prudence's lastname is consistentlyspelled "Bolton,"although no otherbiographeruses this. Even Cappel in her earlier book spells this Boulton. If she discovered an alternate spelling, say in the death certificate, she should have stated this. She also calls Prudence's final lover and co-suicide bytwo different names: Jim...