The Apprenticeship Of Ernest Hemingway

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THE APPRENTICESHIP OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY

THE

APPRENTICESHIP

OF

ERNEST
HEMINGWAY

THE EARLY YEARS

BY
CHARLES A. FENTON

FARRAR, STRAUS & YOUNG NEW YORK

Copyright 1954 by Charles A. Fenton. All rights reserved.
Manufactured in the United States of America.

The author is grateful to^he editors of the American Quarterly,

New World Writing, and the Atlantic for permission to reprint

sections of this book which first appeared in somewhat different

form in their publications.

The material written by Ernest Hemingway for the Toronto Daily

Star and the Toronto Star Weekly is copyright 1920, 1921, 1922,

1923, and 1924 by Ernest Hemingway.

Library of Congress catalog card number: 54-7968
First Printing: 1954

American Book-Stratford Press, Inc., New York

TO
DANIEL H. FENTON

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

CHAPTER

I OAK PARK 1

II KANSAS CITY 28

III ITALY 50

IV TORONTO 74
V CHICAGO 96

VI EUROPE 118

VII PARIS 145

VIII ASIA MINOR 170

IX LAUSANNE 188

X THE RUHR 204

XI PARIS 224

XII TORONTO 242

Notes 265

Index 291

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is a definition of the process by which Ernest
Hemingway transposed a conventional talent into an ar-
tistic skill. It is based on the premise that his extraordinary
position "Hemingway is the bronze god of the whole con-
temporary literary experience in America," said Alfred
Kazin in 1942 warrants close investigation of a period that
lasted no more than half a dozen years. That the apprentice-
ship was a vital element is verified by the almost immediate
assumption of Hemingway's importance by critics, public,
and, above all, by other writers as soon as his work began
to appear in the United States in 1925, and by the durability
of his creative life.

The principal instrument of his literary apprenticeship
was journalism. Hemingway was a working newspaperman,
both intermittently and for long intervals, during the years
between October, 1916, and December, 1923. Other factors
contributed to the nature and importance of this apprentice-
ship, including war, travel, sport, and a variety of vocational
and literary associations. Hemingway's apprenticeship was
extensive, sustained, and purposeful, involving influences
which have been overlooked or misunderstood. It was a
powerful force in the formation of the style and attitudes
which have been generally regarded as characteristic of his
mature work. It was also, in terms of journalism itself, and
in terms of his first expatriate fiction in 1922 and 1923, a
period of achievement as well as development.

IX

In a very real sense Hemingway's apprenticeship has
never ended. This too has contributed to his durability. It
is also additional verification of the importance of the 1916-
1923 apprenticeship, which established his professional prin-
ciples and habits. He has continued to impose upon himself
a demanding growth and a rigid discipline. "I'm apprenticed
out at it," he told a friend in 1949, "until I die. Dopes can
say you mastered it. But I know nobody ever mastered it,
nor could not have done better." This is the story of his
first apprenticeship.

It is a story to which many people have contributed their
memories and judgment. No more than its outlines could
have been detected without the help of more individuals
than I care to remember. I have inadequately acknowledged
my immense debts in the Notes to individual chapters. Some
of these debts require additional acknowledgment: either
geographical availability, or their own patience, and in cer-
tain cases a fatal combination of the two, made the follow-
ing individuals particularly vulnerable to my persistence. I
am deeply grateful to Archibald S. Alexander; Professor
Carlos Baker; Morley Callaghan; Gregory Clark; the late
J. Herbert Cranston; J. Charles Edgar; John Gehlmann; the
late Henry J. Haskell; William D. Home, Jr.; Mrs. Guy
Hickok; Wilson Hicks; Chester Kerr; Clifford Knight;
David Randall; Mary Lowry Ross; William B. Smith; Y. K.
Smith; Frederick W. Spiegel; Arthur L. Thexton; Professor
Edward Wagenknecht; and Donald M. Wright.

Part of the story, too, was to be found in libraries. I
was the beneficiary not only of James T. Babb, Librarian,
Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, and his re-
sourceful staff, but also of the Kansas City (Mo.) Public
Library, and in particular Miss Grace Berger, Reference
Chief; Stanley Pargellis and The Newberry Library; John
D. Gordon, Curator, Berg Collection, New York Public
Library; Miss Elsie McKay, Librarian, Oak Park (111.) Pub-

lie Library; Miss Laura E. Loeber, Reference Librarian,
Toronto Public Library; and The Toronto Star Reference
Library. I am grateful on many counts to Donald C. Gallup,
Curator, Yale Collection of American Literature.

Mr. Hemingway generously answered a number of trou-
blesome questions at the beginning of the investigation, but
I am even more indebted to him for the grace with which
he endured the invasions of a project that held little appeal
and considerable irritation for him. Like everyone who
serves with and near Benjamin C. Nangle, I owe him
more than I can say; I owe more than most, since he was
compelled to teach me a great deal while allowing me to
pose as his colleague. I have cited one aspect of my obliga-
tion to Norman Holmes Pearson in the Notes to Chap-
ter Seven, but it is a debt whose many aspects cannot
be properly catalogued. The debt was compounded by the
part he played in the version of this book which was origin-
ally presented as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy at Yale University. To my wife, for whom the
project represented even more of an invasion than for its
subject, I offer not only my thanks but also, again, my
apologies.

Yale University C.A.F.

7 March 1954

XI

CHAPTER
I

OAK PARK

"What does one learn about writing in
high school? You are lucky if you're
not taught to write badly." 1

Ernest Hemingway has always been acutely aware of
Oak Park, Illinois, where he was born in July, 1899 and
lived continuously until 1917. The fact that he has rarely
written directly of his boyhood there is misleading as a
measure of his response to the community. By conscious
design he substituted other experiences for his absorption in
that particular world.

A number of unpleasant things happened to Hemingway
in Oak Park. He was never wholly at ease with its rather
special milieu, nor it with him. Oak Park, however, has
always been a fundamental element in his attitudes. It con-
ditioned certain of his values in a way that is almost a parody
of popular concepts about the importance of heredity and
environment. Even in middle age, thirty-five years after he
graduated from its high school and left its physical bound-
aries, he still thought of Oak Park with creative regret. "I
had a wonderful novel to write about Oak Park," Heming-
way said in 1952, "and would never do it because I did not
want to hurt living people."

Had he written such a novel, or should he ever write one
in the future, it would be intensely discussed, if not actually
read, in Oak Park; its interest in him has been even greater,

2 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

and far less charitable, than his in the community. The town
is vastly changed today, bigger, shabbier, less genteel and
spacious, but Hemingway's legend is an explosive one
among those of his generation who have remained there.
Older residents take a perverse pride in his achievement and
his fame. They invariably preface their discussions of his
work by hastily disclaiming any actual acquaintanceship
with it. Their principal concern is directed at what they
understand to be its general tone.

"The wonder to me," said one of his teachers many years
after Hemingway's departure, "and to a lot of other Oak
Parkers, is how a boy brought up in Christian and Puritan
nurture should know and write so well of the devil and the
underworld." Most of the community shares the pious be-
wilderment of that older group. "It is a puzzle," another
native declared in 1952, "and, too, an amazement to Oak
Park that Ernest should have written the kind of books that
he did."

Those comments, although they were made at mid-
century, are in the authentic idiom of pre-World War I
Oak Park. The community was more than respectable. It
was respectable and prosperous. It was also Protestant and
middle class. It exulted in all these characteristics. For Oak
Park there was nothing ludicrous in its qualities. Its citizens
experienced the same sense of community membership as
occurs in such suburbs as Brookline, Massachusetts; they
thought of themselves as specifically living in Oak Park
rather than Chicago, just as one lives in Brookline rather
than Boston. "Oak Park," a contemporary of Hemingway
once said, without satire, "has prided itself on being the
largest village in the world."

As was only natural, though not apparent to most resi-
dents of Oak Park, such a structure had flaws as well as
virtues. If Oak Park could boast that it had successfully
resisted incorporation into the politics and corruption of

OAK PARK 3

nearby Chicago, thus retaining a mild town-meeting flavor
in its management, it was also heir to the provincialism of
village life. One's neighbors were scrutinized with New
England severity. If one happened to be, like Ernest Hem-
ingway, the oldest son of a union between two such locally
prominent families as the Hemingways and the Halls, the
scrutiny was merely the more intense. It was an atmosphere
calculated both to irritate and attract a boy who was proud,
competitive, and intelligent, particularly if his intelligence
were of a satiric and inquiring kind.

It was also a rather limited world in the superficial sense
of not presenting a variety of types or scenes. The forth-
coming shock of contact with the ugliness of, for example,
journalism and war, would be intense and memorable for
a young man raised in such a relatively sheltered world.
There is a pleasant sameness to the streets of the older part
of Oak Park, north of Washington Boulevard, which docu-
ments the local boast that this was the middle-class capital
of the world. The houses have become seedy rather than
charming in their antiquity, for fashionable suburbia has
moved northward along the Lake. Now there are boarding
houses along North Kenilworth Avenue, but the burgher
solidity of forty years ago is still detectable.

It was a world far more homogeneous, socially and eco-
nomically, than exists today in similar American residential
districts. Oak Parkers, trying to communicate the flavor of
their childhoods, stress the fact that there was no other side
of the tracks; their memories err, as it happens, but the
deeply cherished illusion is even more revealing through
being inaccurate. 2 Some fathers were clearly more success-
ful than others, and there were delicate gradations within the
social equality of Oak Park, but in the vision of the average
Oak Park child there was neither poverty nor ostentation.
There were no saloons, for the town was righteously dry;
the wide-open streets of nearby Cicero were an unknown

4 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

excitement for most Oak Park adolescents. The center of
social life, even for the most sophisticated, was the school
and the family church. The boundary between Chicago and
Oak Park, in fact, was defined by the irreverent as the point
where the saloons ended and the churches began.

In such a community education was as important as re-
ligion, and equally earnest. Like most Midwesterners of
their class and period, Oak Parkers had a real hostility to-
ward the eastern private schools to which many of them
might well have sent their children. They therefore estab-
lished for the local school system, and particularly in the
secondary field, standards that were genuinely impressive.
Few of the graduates of Oak Park High had any difficulty
with the admission requirements of Williams, Mount Holy-
oke, Wellesley, Yale, Amherst, or the fashionable and more
regionally attractive Beloit. Oak Park candidates dominated
the competitive exams for the ten scholarships the Univer-
sity of Chicago awarded annually to area students. Teach-
ing salaries were well above the average. The academic plant
was first-class in every way. Those graduates who later
attended college the percentage was generally as high as
two-thirds of a senior class, exceptional for the period
frequently discovered that Oak Park teaching was superior
to their later instruction. Residents of the town were likely
to maintain, with justification, that four years at Oak Park
High were the equivalent of two years of college.

The school's curriculum, quite naturally, was built
around the liberal arts. The English Department, to which
Hemingway responded most fully, and in whose classes
his contemporaries remembered him most clearly, was large
and efficient. English was required during each of the four
years. For all classes, from English I through English IV,
there was an emphasis on the fundamentals of language. "I
think the level of instruction in Oak Park was high," said
Janet Lewis, a 1916 graduate who became both a poet and

OAK PARK 5

university teacher, "because we learned to spell, and to
write coherently."

Even in freshman year, however, there were also inten-
sive reading assignments. The backbone of the syllabus was
the literary achievement of the past, to such a degree, in
fact, that the University of Chicago once criticized the
English Department for the predominance of classics in its
courses. In their first year of English the Oak Park students
read a widely used text of the period, H. A. Guerber's
Myths of Greece and Rome. The stories were "narrated,"
Guerber pointed out in his subtitle, "with special reference
to literature and art." Guerber's presentation of the myths
themselves was in a conventionally literary idiom, but his
narrative style was lively and entertaining.

There was, in fact, an emphasis on narrative in English
I, where Hemingway's section was taught by Frank J. Platt,
the department chairman. Two of the supplementary texts
were Rhodes' Old Testament Narratives and One Hundred
Narrative Poems. The fiction that was read in class, novels
such as Ivanhoe, was material of the same emphatic story
content. There was also a great deal of outside reading.
Some of it was in "good current literature" H. G. Wells,
for example, and Owen Wister but the popular novels of
the era were virtually outlawed.

It was nonetheless as sound a reading background as one
could ask of a freshman English course, and superior to the
average curriculum. It becomes less lugubrious in terms of
Hemingway's mature work when we recall that he subse-
quently said, "that's how I learned to write by reading
the Bible," adding that by the Bible he meant particularly
the Old Testament. 3 The concern with the substantial work
of the past continued in English II, part of whose assign-
ments and classroom discussions included a survey of Amer-
ican literature. English HI was primarily public speaking
and essay writing. In senior year the emphasis returned to

6 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

the classics. Here, in English IV, Oak Park seniors encoun-
tered a study of English literature so thorough that one of
Hemingway's classmates later found that an advanced Eng-
lish survey at the University of Chicago was a duplication
of his high school course. The discipline of intensive drill
which had begun in English I was thus continued in the
fourth year, save that now it revolved around the study and
memorization of long passages of verse, particularly Chaucer
and Shakespeare.

By senior year, however, Hemingway was writing as well
as reading. His instructor in English I, in fact, who remem-
bered him as a "bright scholar," gifted in "the communica-
tive arts," later maintained that even in his freshman themes
Hemingway wrote "with an avid interest in realistic adven-
ture." Several contemporaries from Mr. Platt's section had
the same memories. They also remembered that Fleming-
way's work was highly individual. "I can recall," said one
of them, who was for a time a close friend and neighbor,
"that his writings in this class were different to the extent
that it seemed to me they might not be acceptable as the
assignment."

It was after freshman year, however, that Hemingway
worked under what he himself cited as his significant
teachers. Questioned many years later about the English
faculty in general, Hemingway mentioned only two teach-
ers. "In High School," he said in 1951, "I had two teachers
of English: Miss Fannie Biggs and Miss Dixon. I think they
were the two advisers on the Tabula [the school literary
magazine] and they were both very nice and especially
nice to me because I had to try to be an athlete as well as
try to learn to write English." Miss Biggs' and Miss Dixon's
principal teaching assignments were in the upperclass
courses that stressed composition and public speaking.
Hemingway's interest in writing was stimulated both by

OAK PARK 7

the nature of the curriculum and by the particular gifts of
these two teachers.

"I think Ernie started seriously to write soon after 1915,"
said an older student who saw a good deal of him at this
time. "He had a typewriter on the third floor, well away
from his family. By that time he was writing for the fun
of it and apparently felt that he was developing ability
along that line. He would read to me some of the things he
was writing and was quite enthusiastic." It was about this
time too, however, as he became heavy enough for the
varsity squads, that athletics began to interfere with his
writing. "It was not like Scott [Fitzgerald] wanting to be
an athlete," Hemingway once explained. "I had no ambi-
tion nor choice. At Oak Park if you could play football
you had to play it." Miss Dixon and Miss Biggs relieved
some of the frustration.

They were exceptional as teachers and as individuals.
Their quality is eagerly documented by the testimony of
colleagues and students. Margaret Dixon expressed in her
classes the vigor and conviction of an articulate, positive
woman. She was gifted in and interested by verbal narra-
tive. "At an evening social or party among friends," the
chairman of her department remembered, "she would be
the center of attraction, as she regaled her listeners with
details of some lively experience." A classmate of Heming-
way, who later became a teacher himself, remembered her
with startling clarity. Edward Wagenknecht studied under
her for two successive years, and "knew her very well." He
could recall both her personality and her classes.

"Margaret Dixon," said Wagenknecht in 1951, "was a
very frank, straightforward, honest, down-to-earth person,
though within the standards of decorous respectability that
were favored in Oak Park. She had a temper, and her class
was never a dull place. She was an outspoken liberal. Again
and again, she expressed in the classroom her admiration for

8 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Woodrow Wilson and her utter contempt for Theodore
Roosevelt. She was also more interested in movies than most
high school teachers admitted they were in those days."

Miss Dixon's friends in Oak Park often heard her de-
scribe Hemingway with enthusiasm, speaking of him as the
most brilliant student she ever had; they realized too that
a woman of her hard integrity would be incapable of alter-
ing the past to fit the achievement of Hemingway's matu-
rity. In her teaching, according to a classmate who worked
with Hemingway on the school paper and sat near him in
class, Miss Dixon "pushed the creative side, and urged us
to use our imagination and dare to try putting into writing
our original and interesting thoughts." Miss Dixon was a
blunt critic. u She was salty in her criticism, proud and full
of praise for our efforts and quite ready to rip at what was
not good."

Margaret Dixon's importance to Hemingway was in this
area of temperament and attitude. Her blunt honesty and
mild iconoclasm were valuable antidotes to the smug com-
placence of Oak Park. "Her economic and social ideas,"
one of her personal friends recalled drily, "were somewhat
at variance with the very conservative school and com-
munity." American high schools have been blessed with
many Miss Dixons; she was not professionally unique, nor
was her relationship with Hemingway an unusual one, but it
was a piece of extreme good fortune that she was available
to Hemingway. "She was always trying to get us to write
stories and essays," another classmate of Hemingway testi-
fied. "I don't believe I ever had any professors at Dart-
mouth or Illinois who were better instructors and I majored
in English."

Fannie Biggs, the other English teacher whom Heming-
way described as "very nice and especially nice to me," was
the ideal complement for Miss Dixon. "She was a kind of
genius," according to one of her colleagues, "a frail but

OAK PARK 9

wiry little woman, with a well-read mind, with exacting
requirements, and with a fine sense of humor." Her associ-
ates defined the two women by comparing them to one
another. "Miss Dixon's work," said another member of the
department, "was a clarification in whatever the assign-
ment might be. Miss Biggs, out of much more tempera-
mental disposition, would flourish more in the field of
imagination."

Fannie Biggs' interest in Hemingway was somewhat
more personal than Miss Dixon's. She responded not only
to his potential as a student, but to his problems as an indi-
vidual. She observed his difficulties, most of them common
to all adolescent boys, a few of them peculiar to his par-
ticular position, and did what she could, in the most tenta-
tive way, to soften them. Hemingway was at ease with her,
in a manner that was neither odd nor excessive. Occasion-
ally he spoke to her in a peripheral fashion about something
that was troubling him. A year after he graduated from
high school, and with seven months of Kansas City news-
paper work completed, it was to Fannie Biggs that Heming-
way boasted mildly about his journalistic triumphs, just
before he left in May, 1918 for the war in Italy. Years later,
when he recalled the one teacher as Miss Dixon, he remem-
bered the other as Fannie Biggs. There was a difference.

The difference came as much as anything from the fact
that while Miss Dixon was interested in writing, Fannie
Biggs was devoted to it. It was Fannie Biggs who was the
principal force in the Story Club, a picked class which was
selected by competition at the end of junior year and which
met once a week under her leadership during the next year.
These seniors, usually a group of twenty-five, read their
stories aloud and discussed them critically. "I remember,"
one of those young writers declared, "that she was always
particularly pleased when Ernest would come up with
something definitely unusual." Other classmates had the

10 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

same recollections. "She was very much interested in Ernest
and his evident ability and love of writing. I have clearly
remembered and mentioned many times her picking out
themes of Ernest's and reading them to the class as out-
standing examples of whatever it was she had requested."
Oak Park regarded Fannie Biggs as the creative member
of the English Department. Her students could always re-
call the energy of her vision, and one of them remembered
that when she helped him on his commencement address,
in the spring of 1917, she reshaped his heavy paragraphs
into "a poetic approach whose meaning I scarcely under-
stood at the time and have come to value later." The title
toward which she led young Edward Willcox's oratory
indicates the nature of her temperament. His commence-
ment address for the class of 1917 was "A Plea for Pan."

It would be a distortion, however, to conceive of Hem-
ingway as a predominantly bookish or literary high school
student. In the accumulation of extracurricular posts and
memberships Hemingway was spectacularly well-rounded.
It required eight lines to list his achievements in the Class
Book. Only the class president and one of its star athletes
exceeded him in the length of their paragraphs.

Hemingway was chosen to write the Class Prophecy,
which automatically admitted him to the elite group of
Class Day Speakers. He was a member of the orchestra
during his first three years. In senior year he played Richard
Brinsley Sheridan in the class play, Fitch's Beau BrummelL
As a junior he was a reporter for the weekly newspaper,
the Trapeze; the next year he became one of its six editors.
During both those years he contributed stories and poems
to the literary magazine. In his last two years he belonged
to a trio of debating and self-improvement groups. The

OAK PARK 11

Hanna Club met at regular intervals to listen to prominent
businessmen and local civic leaders; the Burke Club was an
exercise in oratory and parliamentary procedure, and the
Boys' High School Club offered its members a series of
addresses "on efficiency, Christianity and such things that
are desirable to the life of a boy." 4 Hemingway was in the
Athletic Association as a freshman, sophomore, and senior.
He played junior varsity football in his second and third
years; in his senior year he was on the championship first
team. He was track manager, too, that year, and a member
of the swimming team. He was captain of water basketball.
During his first three years, according to the Class Book,
he belonged to the Boys' Rifle Club.

That particular membership became part of the class
legend, for the Boys' Rifle Club was in reality a desperate
inspiration which Hemingway devised as editor of the
Trapeze, during a week when he was confronted by an
empty column and no material with which to fill it. He
hastily created the mythical organization, stimulated by the
existence of a genuine Girls' Rifle Club, and listed himself
and five friends as members. The story was read with inter-
est and acceptance, and for several weeks, according to the
late Morris Musselman, Hollywood writer and Oak Park
classmate, Hemingway filed additional stories about the
club's matches and incredible skill. In the spring the Class
Book editors, in good faith, asked for a picture of the group.
Hemingway was equal to the crisis. He borrowed a shotgun
for each of the five marksmen, none of whom had either
owned or fired such a weapon, and posed them profession-
ally.

The anecdote restores the proper perspective to any con-
ception of Hemingway as a mere victim of a highly organ-
ized school hierarchy. He was as vigorously competitive in
Oak Park as he has been in his manhood. This spirited
energy has even contributed one element of his artistic

12 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

creed. "Listen," he told a young writer in 1936, "there is
no use writing anything that has been written before unless
you can beat it. What a writer in our time has to do is write
what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what
they have done." 5

He is not always as literarily belligerent as that, however,
and frequently his artistic pronouncements have been sar-
donic and relaxed. The Rifle Club burlesque of extracur-
ricular frenzy represented the same healthy self-irony.
Hemingway has seldom been able to resist a challenge in
any area of his life, but he has rarely solemnized his com-
petitive zeal. The instinct to win has been almost a reflex;
his conscious attitude toward the reflex has caused it to
become graceful. "I remember," said one classmate, "that
often his themes were humorous. And this is something I
have talked about since he was gay in those days, always
laughing, carefree. His literary ability was recognized, but
one might have predicted that he would be a writer of
humor."

It was characteristic of such a temperament that this
buoyancy should disguise a more somber aspect of his life
and attitudes. Hemingway as an adult has never taken any-
thing easily, nor do many high school students of intelli-
gence and sensitivity have an entirely carefree existence.
It is this side of his Oak Park boyhood which has been
emphasized by Freudian literary commentators and casual
biographers. Hemingway himself has encouraged the legend
of a turbulent youth. The occasional tensions of the period
have been magnified until the symbol of his boyhood is a
runaway vagabondage. Such episodes did occur of course,
as they occur for many boys; they are almost a pattern for
a certain kind of middle-class American boyhood.

His brief flights from home sufficiently brief so that he
never dropped back in school because of them were little
more than the rebellious independence of a restless boy.

OAK PARK 13

Years later Hemingway declared that the best training for
a writer was an unhappy boyhood. This was in part a seri-
ous statement, applicable to a degree in his own case; in
part, too, it was a sly comment on literature in general and
first novels in particular, and an ironic, characteristic be-
littlement of artistic solemnity. To think of his adolescence
in terms of misery or maladjustment is to misunderstand
his Oak Park experience and his personality as a whole.

It is true that his adolescence was made difficult by the
intensity of his own character and the complexity of his
family relationships. Normally his common sense and
energy sustained him; occasionally he had bleak moments.
The spartan demands of his physician father invariably con-
flicted with the rich artistic aura which his mother at-
tempted to cast over her family; there was inevitable con-
fusion and bitterness for a boy as responsive and sensitive
as their oldest son. The stress of emotional tension, how-
ever, contributed to the growing opaqueness of his vision.
From his wanderings and escapades he began to acquire a
precocious wisdom. Some of the faculty, and an occasional
contemporary, sensed in him an unusual awareness. "When
I expressed surprise at the sophistication of his books," said
a classmate who was the daughter of a teacher, "my father
said that he had been more knowing in high school than
the rest of us."

Little of this ambivalence was readily apparent. It was
never more than a minor factor in an otherwise restless but
reasonably well-adjusted period. "I heard stories about
Ernest being a 'tough guy/ having run away from home,
etc.," said Edward Wagenknecht, "but I never saw any-
thing to confirm any of this." He could hardly have ac-
quired those eight inches devoted to him in the class book
had his four years been chaotic or disturbed. The epitaph
beneath his extracurricular record summed up the wry, im-

14 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

pressed assessment of his contemporaries. "None," they
concluded, "are to be found more clever than Ernie." 6

The cleverness which his Oak Park classmates discovered
in Hemingway went beyond the casual wit and horseplay
of high school friendships. It also took the more permanent
form of publication. Most of his classmates remembered
this role as primarily that of an entertaining reporter and
columnist for the school newspaper. He also published a
moderate amount of fiction and verse in the literary maga-
zine; his work in the Tabula reaffirms those qualities which
caused his classmates to greet with eagerness the themes he
read in the English courses.

Hemingway never held office on the Tabula, and, indeed,
the aggressiveness which he brought to the more conven-
tionally masculine activities was conspicuously absent or
concealed in his early attitude toward both the magazine
and the newspaper. There was a reticence in his attitude
toward all artistic or semi-artistic endeavor. Its origins were
in his personal background. He lived in a household where
creative talent was oppressively honored. For a time he
deliberately cultivated the other capacities of his tempera-
ment. When his stories did begin to appear in the Tabula
it was almost by an act of conspiracy on the part of his
supporters.

"He never submitted a story or essay to the school maga-
zine while 1 was on it," said a classmate whose editorial
tenure on the Tabula covered their junior arid senior years.
"But Mr. Platt, the magazine's faculty adviser, came with
a manuscript, evidently handed to him by Miss Dixon, and
I knew that this essay or story about a hunting expedition
was considered good enough by the teachers that it was to
be printed whether it appealed to me or not."

OAK PARK 15

The story itself, "Judgment of Manitou," published in
the issue of February, 1916, is quite naturally without ar-
tistic validity, save in the synthetic hindsight of Heming-
way's mature work. 7 The dialogue, it is true, was neither
forced nor literary, and the narrative was brisk and lucid.
To cite the story as a prophecy of ultimate creative force,
however, would be bogus. The fiction was noteworthy
only in the sense that it is always noteworthy when a high
school junior labors long enough to contrive a readable
narrative. "Judgment of Manitou" was thoroughly read-
able. It marked the author as possessing an interest in the
mechanics of storytelling. Its rich detail indicated that he
enjoyed writing it. More than that, in terms of foreshadow-
ing, it does not permit. Dealing as it did with the scenes
Hemingway encountered each summer at the family home
in northern Michigan, it could be said to confirm his early
absorption in nature and in violence. The vindictive trapper
and the young associate whom he murders, their conflict
framed in the mysticism of Indian folklore, are reminiscent
of a Jack London treatment. It is a savage story, tempered
by irony, and those characteristics have been basic in his
later work. Had Hemingway become a minor poet, on the
other hand, or a slick serialist, "Judgment of Manitou"
could be juggled with equal plausibility into becoming a
promise of subsequent achievement in verse or in the
women's magazines.

The story's utility as an index to this phase of Heming-
way's apprenticeship lies in certain negative areas. Its liter-
acy documents the sound education he was receiving. The
story is superior to most adolescent fiction by virtue of its
control and lucidity. Sixteen-year-old authors normally pro-
duce material that is throttled by false starts and frequent
climaxes; the ending is frequently without relation to the
beginning, and characters tend to appear from nowhere
and dissolve with equal ease. "Judgment of Manitou" wa$

16 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

clear and precise. The orderly presentation reflected the
discipline Hemingway had received in the fundamentals of
composition. The absence of stylistic affectations was a
tribute to the good taste of his teachers. "Judgment of
Manitou" was an unpretentious story, elaborate only in its
relatively complicated plot. Its sturdy clarity was far more
durable as a base.

By his junior year, indeed, when Hemingway wrote this
story, he was in some ways unusually thoughtful about
writing, although the bulk of his energy was still absorbed
by more conventional outlets. He was responding to his
teaching in a brooding, undramatic way. One of the most
acute of his classmates, herself very much interested in
writing, could remember that at this time she had not read
widely enough to grasp all the subtleties of elementary
literary technique. "When Ernest one day spoke of an
author's style/' she said later, "I knew that he had either
read more or was more sensitive than I." She recalled that
some of Hemingway's classroom exercises were entirely
beyond her. "He wrote a story about an Irish detective
named O'Hell that was outside my orbit."

Hemingway's next work in the Tabula demonstrated
this same kind of approach, an instinctive professionalism
which was a blend of inclination, reading, and the example
of persuasive, unaffected teachers. "A Matter of Colour"
was published in the following issue of the Tabula, in April,
1916. 8 The story was in some ways an improvement over
its predecessor, particularly in its less obvious reliance on
coincidence. Hemingway's principal strength, however,
continued to be his utilization of material which he had
either experienced or observed. He dealt with the prize
fight world he was just then encountering through his box-
ing lessons in a Chicago gym.

He made no attempt to impose a statement on the story.
Its basic structure was an ironic anecdote about a crooked

OAK PARK 17

fight. The denouement was withheld until the final line;
everything hinged upon the information of that last sen-
tence. The treatment reflected the current debt to O.
Henry. It was pure gimmick, a build-up for a vaudeville
punch line. The story was presented as a monologue by a
veteran fight manager. Old Bob Armstrong spoke in lan-
guage which was an attempt to reproduce an authentic
idiom, but, like the narrators in most professional magazine
fiction of the period, he was so carefully shaped into a
recognizable type that his speech became a single heavy
cliche. Occasionally Hemingway permitted the dialogue to
flow without the hackneyed phrases. " 'It can't be helped,'
says Dan. 'That bag wasn't fastened proper; I'll fight any-
way/ " The primary significance of Hemingway's Tabula
stories is to emphasize the crucial apprenticeship which lay
ahead of him in journalism, in war, and in the European
associations of the 1920's. His high school fiction demon-
strates that he was blessed with an acute interest in all new
experience, a ready narrative style, and a sound training in
clear self-expression. The rest would come only after a
series of increasingly more sophisticated tutors and a vast
amount of personal growth and application.

The momentum of English III, out of which had come
"Judgment of Manitou" and "A Matter of Colour," was
nevertheless an important factor. It sustained Hemingway's
instinct toward creative writing even during his senior year,
when most of the impulse was being satisfied by his work
for the school newspaper. The first issue of the 1916-17
Tabula, published in November, featured another story
drawn from the northern Michigan material. 9 "Sepi Jingan"
was also largely dialogue, a tale of violence and revenge
told by an O jib way Indian. This time Hemingway avoided
the artificiality of total monologue. There was a base of
fragmentary exposition; the narrator asked occasional ques-
tions that kept the Indian's speech fluid.

18 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The most promising characteristic of "Sepi Jingan," how-
ever, was Hemingway's introduction of a statement. His
conception of the two previous stories had never gone
beyond the anecdotes themselves. Now he created another
dimension by inserting the paradox of an O jib way killer
who was also a kind, decent man, patient with the questions
of the young summer resident, tender with the dog, Sepi
Jingan, and more deeply concerned about the merits of
various pipe tobaccos than the savage memories of the
manhunt he was describing. The statement was clumsily
handled at times, nor, understandably, had Hemingway yet
learned to make a thesis unobtrusive and implicit. The dia-
logue, however, was smoother, partially cleansed of the
tendency to entertain his classmates with smart hyperbole,
and to the clarity of narrative there had been added a calm,
worldly discernment.

The edge of the full moon showed above the hill to the
east. To our right was a grassy bank. "Let's sit down," Bill
said. "Did I ever tell you about Sepi Jingan?"

"Like to hear it," I replied.

"You remember Paul Black Bird?"

"The new fellow who got drunk last fourth of July and
went to sleep on the Pere Marquette tracks?"

"Yes. He was a bad Indian. Up on the upper peninsula
he couldn't get drunk. He used to drink all day every-
thing. But he couldn't get drunk. Then he would go crazy;
but he wasn't drunk. He was crazy because he couldn't get
drunk."

The knowledgeability took various forms, as has the
knowledgeability of his mature work. It was not always as
adult as the mature estimate of Paul Black Bird's misery.
Occasionally Hemingway was content to mine only slap-
stick from this capacity for understanding. One of Miss

OAK PARK 19

Dixon's annual assignments to her upperclassmen, for ex-
ample, was the composition of a ballad. Hemingway's pre-
cocious handling of this exercise was printed in that same
November, 1916 issue of the Tabula. 10 It was an ancient
device whose entire forty-eight lines consisted of varia-
tions on the author's query as to what he should write about
and how he should rhyme it. The first stanza stated the
approach and content of the other five.

Oh, I've never writ a ballad
And Fd rather eat shrimp salad,
(Tho' the Lord knows how I hate the
Pink and Scrunchy little beasts),
But Miss Dixon says I gotto
(And I pretty near forgotto)
But I'm sitting at my table
And my feet are pointing east.

The whole lively jest, "How Ballad Writing Affects Our
Seniors," indicated something more than confident charm
and an affection for Kipling. There was a glossy finish that
was alien to the solemnity of the Tabula; even the HE-SHE
jokes in the SMILES department, where the ballad was
printed, were heavy by comparison. The technical dex-
terity, unremarkable in any large sense, was impressive in
a high school student. It was a variation of the increasing
sophistication which had encouraged him to attempt the
paradox of "Sepi Jingan."

Hemingway confirmed this sleek facility with several
other poems during his senior year. His range extended
from a neat burlesque of James Whitcomb Riley through
solemn lines about the moral superiority of a Great Lakes
stoker to his effete passengers. 11 He also collaborated with
his friend and teammate, Fred Wilcoxen, in some impres-
sionistic, Sandburg-like free verse about a football game. 12

20 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The heroic aura of "Athletic Verse" must have been largely
the contribution of Wilcoxen, the star athlete of the Class of
1917, a three-letter man who had been on varsity squads
as early as his sophomore year. Football for Hemingway
had been largely an unavoidable chore. "Football," he ex-
plained later, talking about the experiences which had been
helpful in learning to write, "I knew too much about and
it did not interest me really and I have never written a line
about it." 13

Ironically, however, Hemingway's senior year was spent
in the creatively unfruitful competitions as opposed to
boxing or fishing of high school sport. He not only played
varsity football all that fall, but even in his writing he was
for a time restricted to sports material for the weekly news-
paper. It was in the Trapeze, in fact, rather than the Tabula,
that Hemingway's apprenticeship really began. Journalism
would be the basic ingredient of his formal training, at least
until 1922, and his vocation from 1920 until 1924. His news-
paper career was thrust upon him in Oak Park in the winter
of 1916, when he was sixteen.

IV.

Between January, 1916 and May, 1917, Hemingway's
by-line usually Ernest M. Hemingway, as it remained
throughout his newspaper work appeared more than thirty
times in the Trapeze. The Trapeze, a characteristic second-
ary school paper, was in no way more typical than in the
emphatic prominence it gave to sports coverage. Heming-
way's assignment to the varsity contests thus certified him
as an acceptable reporter in the estimation of the editors and
their faculty adviser. The latter, indeed, subsequently de-
clared that by the end of his junior year Hemingway "was
recognized as the best writer on the staff."

It was to Arthur Bobbitt, in fact, that Hemingway owed

OAK PARK 21

his initial push into journalism. In 1916, when the history
teacher was first appointed its sponsor, the Trapeze was
being published irregularly. It was largely the preserve of
one or two students. Bobbitt reorganized it as a weekly,
with a fixed publication schedule and a conventional stu-
dent hierarchy of editors, business staff, and reporters.
Bobbitt vividly recalled the occasion when he recruited
Hemingway; he told the story many times to colleagues
and students. His classmates, Bobbitt suggested to Heming-
way one day in study hall, had often spoken about his writ-
ing ability, Hemingway replied that he didn't want to write
for the paper. "I'm not interested in writing," he said.

It was the same synthetic resistance which a few weeks
later caused Hemingway's reluctance to publish his fiction,
requiring the intercession of Mr. Platt and Miss Dixon be-
fore "Judgment of Manitou" was submitted to the Tabula.
"No, I don't want to," he repeated to Bobbitt, but he got
the article in by the deadline, and though Bobbitt had to
repeat his arguments for the next issue, Hemingway, the
adviser recalled, "soon became an enthusiastic reporter."

The material Hemingway wrote for the Trapeze in the
winter and spring of 1916 was competent but in no way
exceptional. There were several others on the staff who
seem by their work to have been as able reporters as he;
one of his contemporaries, in fact, maintained later that "it
seems strange now, but most of us thought he wrote very
indifferently." In reality the quality of Hemingway's early
reportage was a compromise between the retrospective en-
thusiasm of Mr. Bobbitt and the skepticism of the classmate.
He wrote seven by-lined articles that first year, and was
sufficiently capable, and interested, so that when the staff
was chosen for senior year he was named as one of the six
editors.

Hemingway was even more productive as an editor than
as a reporter. He wrote twenty-four stories between No-

22 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

vember, 1916 and May, 1917. There was scarcely an issue
during that period in which his by-line did not appear at
least once; several times he had as many as three articles in
a single number. The stories were usually five or six hun-
dred words long. Although Hemingway was functioning
as a reporter rather than a columnist, he could not always
maintain the objectivity of conventional reportage. "As
usual," he noted bitterly in a description of a one-sided loss
by the home team, "Oak Park was without the services of
their constantly ineligible stars and Standish joined the miss-
ing pair due to parental objection to his swimming." 14

Such cditorialization would have been red-penciled by
Mr. Bobbitt, who supervised the paper very closely. Bob-
bitt, however, as of the issue of December 22, 1916, had
delegated faculty sponsorship of the Trapeze to a young
instructor named John Gehlmann. Like his superior, the
new adviser had no professional newspaper background,
but he was a perceptive, energetic man who encouraged
every reasonable form of student initiative. Gehlmann was
at times a particular ally of Hemingway, for the latter soon
grew restless under the drab bondage of sports writing; on
his own Hemingway launched what was by far the signifi-
cant enterprise, either journalistic or creative, of his high
school writing.

V.

In 1917 Ring Lardner was probably the contemporary
writer most widely read in the Chicago area. His column
in the Chicago Tribune was one of the municipal glories,
revered by subscribers of all ages. Hemingway's contem-
poraries testify to their own excitement when they en-
countered Lardner. For many of them he was the first
contemporary writer they read. "In the Wake of the News"
was an intoxicating diet after the required staples of late

OAK PARK 23

Victorian literature. Hemingway's own response to Lardner
was instantaneous. He documented his homage with a series
of Trapeze adaptations.

The most impressive aspect of Hemingway's use of the
Tribune columnist as a model was the imaginative way in
which he transferred the latter 's techniques into a high
school framework. The boy's work ultimately became more
than an imitation; it was original as well as derivative. Dur-
ing the winter of his senior year Hemingway made four
awkward, repetitive experiments; by the spring he was
using the form with confidence and success. He was no
longer content simply to replace Lardner's situations and
characters with high school facsimiles. He used instead a
Lardnerian treatment of authentic high school material. In
a column of May 4, 1917, addressed to "Dear Marce"
his sister Marcelline was editor that week he demonstrated
the authenticity of his adaptation. The paragraph was an
effective parody of adolescent conversation and attitudes.

Say, Marcelline, did you know that there is 5 pairs of
brothers and sisters in school and invariabsolutely it is a
strange coincidence that the sister is good looking and the
brother is not? Schwabs, Shepherds, Condrons, Krafts and
Hemingways, is it not most peculair that except in one
family the sister is awful lot better looking than the brother.
But we are too modest to say which family is the exception.
Huh? Marcc? 15

Hemingway also understood the Lardner device of self-
derision. "The Trapeze is short of stuff," he wrote, a para-
graph or two later, "and so don't get sore if I string this
out because anyway you should give me lots of space be-
cause we are sisters and brothers." The basic structure of
the entire treatment, in fact, indicated a comprehensive
grasp of Lardner's principal effects, confirming Mr. Bob-

24 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

bitt's subsequent statement that Hemingway "took articles
from the Chicago papers and studied them carefully." The
young satirist completed the seven hundred word column
it was called "Ring Lardner Returns" with a sly gibe
at Oak Park conservatism, which he had already mocked
in paragraphs about smoking and gambling.

Well, Marce, I had better quit now but if you and Mr.
Gchlmann let this go thru you will be glad because think
of the joy it may bring to some suffering heart,

"Lovingly?"

"Ernie"

In fairness to Gehlmann, this derision should have been
directed not at him but at the superintendent, the late
M. R. McDaniel. The latter frequently chided the young
faculty sponsor about Hemingway's columns. "I was always
having to fight criticism by the superintendent," Gehlmann
once said, "that Ernie was writing like Ring Lardner and
consequently a lost soul!" McDaniel remained unimpressed
by Hemingway's mature work. Ultimately the Trapeze
material of Hemingway's adolescence became one of Mc-
Daniel's favorite jests; he was fond of reminding Gehlmann
that Hemingway got his start under the history instructor's
sponsorship. "He held me responsible for the malodorous
writings from Ernie's pen," Gehlmann remembered.

Official opposition, even as mild as Superintendent
McDaniel's, had a predictable effect on Hemingway. He
was back in strength in the next issue. This time, however,
he gave his column a new title. "SOME SPACE FILLED BY
ERNEST MACNAMARA HEMINGWAY," it read, with an ironic
subheading: "Ring Lardner Has Objected to the Use of
His Name." 16 The approach of graduation, as well as the
superintendent's distaste, seemed to furnish Hemingway a
heightened creative momentum, for the bulk of his Lardner

OAK PARK 25

material was written in the last weeks of his senior year.
He published another of his columns in the issue of May
25. 17 The tone of the article, a series of personal paragraphs,
was explicitly in the pattern of his previous satires. Heming-
way bowed out of Oak Park in the role of professional
iconoclast.

"Mr. Dale Bumstead," he began, "gives a dinner dance
tomorrow night at the Country Club. Messers Morris
Musselman, Fred Wilcoxen, Ernest Hemingway, Abraham
Lincoln and General Joffre will not be among those pres-
ent, all having perfect alibis." Hemingway also returned to
the locally profane topic of gambling. "Several members of
the Trap Shooting Club," he declared, "are exhibiting pieces
of silver ware of the Ohlsens' home as trophies of the meet-
ing held there Saturday night. The silver ware is always
the last stakes that Ray puts up." He violated, with relish,
the Oak Park mores on drinking. "A new party enters the
race next fall in the person of the anti-prohibition party.
Its leaders, led by Tom Cusack, nominated the modest edi-
tor of these columns and announced their slogan as 'Hem-
ingway and a full Stein!' "

Hemingway's valediction was thus an amiable round-
house swing at faculty, community, and classmates, not the
less pointed for its amiability. The junior class paid tribute
to him in the first editorial of their Trapeze tenure, citing
"the humor of Airline [Morris Musselman's column] and
Ring Lardner" as having given "more pep to the issues." 18
Even an unliterary classmate who deplored Hemingway's
subsequent career conceded later that "at the time we were
in high school, Ring Lardner was in his prime and Ernie
ran a column in the Trapeze imitating Lardner and it was
quite good."

Hemingway's work for the Trapeze had an importance
far larger than the recognition it brought from his contem-
poraries. It provided him with a personal direction. Mr.

26 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Bobbitt felt with justice that the Trapeze experience was
"the opening wedge for the newspaper experience which
Ernest went into immediately upon graduation." Had he
attended the University of Illinois, as he indicated to his
classmates that he would, Hemingway planned to major in
journalism. 19 He had found in the high school newspaper
experience, and particularly in the freedoms of a column,
at least the beginnings of a tangible objective. He wrote
approximately fifteen thousand words, and once a week he
sat with the other five editors and read and edited the work
of the reporters. He was chosen to write the Class Prophecy,
and his treatment of the assignment was characteristic of
his Trapeze columns; he created an elaborate melodrama,
with a martial setting, in which he cast his classmates in roles
precisely the reverse of their temperaments. 20

His careful adaptations of Lardner had been an invaluable
opening exercise in some of the technicalities of idiomatic
prose, as well as a profitable experiment in various levels of
humor, burlesque, and satire. Years afterwards, at Lardner's
request, Hemingway autographed a book for him, inscrib-
ing it "To Ring Lardner from his early imitator and al-
ways admirer, Ernest Hemingway." 21 Hemingway outgrew
Lardner, as he has outgrown most of his models and tutors.
Like the Trapeze, however, Lardner was an important agent
in the establishment of direction. "There was plenty to
admire," Hemingway said later of Lardner's work. 22

In June, 1917, following his graduation from high school,
the Trapeze and Lardner and writing as a whole were put
aside for the annually welcome escape to the Hemingway
summer home in northern Michigan. Here, in the immense
delights of fishing and camping and a masculine world,
with a group of friends more important to him than his
high school associations, Hemingway extended each summer
another element of his apprenticeship. It was an element
whose importance does not become wholly apparent until

OAK PARK 27

1920, when he used this Michigan material in his free-lance
work for the Toronto Star Weekly. The summer of 1917,
however, was a difficult one for any eighteen-year-old
American as aggressive and restless as Hemingway. For
such a boy the events in Europe marched their distracting
shadows across even the woods of Michigan.

CHAPTER
II

KANSAS CITY

"... in Kansas City he really began
to learn." MAXWELL PERKINS I

Hemingway's restlessness became more acute with each
week that passed in the summer of 1917. The war, and his
father's unalterable opposition to his enlistment "the boy's
too young," the doctor had said, and there the discussion
ended made his situation intolerable. He talked about get-
ting away for good, and about making his way in the world,
and it was finally agreed that in the fall he should go to
Kansas City and get a job. Kansas City had several things
to recommend it.

Carl Edgar, a Horton Bay friend, would be there, work-
ing for a fuel oil company, and though Edgar himself was
also very anxious to get into the war, he was at least an
older man, mature and conscientious. Doctor Hemingway
hoped that he would have a steadying influence on his son.
Hemingway himself had crossed over to Edgar's Pine Lake
cottage almost every day during the early summer. He
observed with envy his friend's prosperity and independ-
ence. In July, just before Edgar went back to Kansas City
at the end of his vacation, Hemingway told him he would
definitely be there in the fall. Edgar was delighted with the
plan. To someone of his own tastes the boy's ingenuousness
and, Edgar once explained, his enthusiasm for "fishing and

KANSAS CITY 29

the out of doors in general," were appealing characteristics.

In Kansas City, too, lived Doctor Hemingway's younger
brother, Tyler Hemingway, a successful, socially promi-
nent businessman. Tyler Hemingway could not only pro-
vide a local regency of family supervision, but he would
also be able to find his nephew a newspaper job; he had
been a classmate at Oberlin of the late Henry J. Haskell,
then chief editorial writer of the Kansas City Star and for
some years its Washington correspondent. 2 "I wanted to
work on the Star" Hemingway declared flatly many years
later, "because I thought it was the best paper in the U.S."
Few of the Star's readers, and not many informed Amer-
icans, would have disagreed with him. The Kansas City
Star was in 1917 one of the half-dozen great American
newspapers.

The Star had been for almost twenty years the natural
target of talented, ambitious Midwesterners. Through its
city room during this period there passed a stream of young,
obscure reporters who during the next generation would
form a kind of self-perpetuating cadre in the editorial rooms
of the Hearst empire, in the Curtis publications in Phila-
delphia, in the executive offices of other, Star-derived Mid-
western papers, and in the writers' wings of Hollywood
studios. Innumerable smooth, professional storytellers served
their apprenticeships under the stern discipline of William
Rockhill Nelson, his lieutenants, and his professional heirs.

Like the revered New York World, with which it was
often compared, the Star infected its staff with a curiosity
about mankind and a craftsmanlike regard for clear, pro-
vocative, good as opposed to "fine" writing. Unlike the
World, which preferred to hire reporters of proven quality,
the Star insisted when possible on training its own men. The
late Courtney Ryley Cooper, gossiping about his own Star
days, recalled that the invention of a mythical background
of experience had not helped his application for a job on

30 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

the paper. "Young man," the assistant editor told him,
"when a man becomes a member of the staff of the Kansas
City Star we give him his experience. We don't want men
from big papers, and we don't want boomers who run
around the country from one paper to another. We train
our men, and we train them well." 3

The atmosphere of the Star was a fresh and exciting one,
for which nothing in Hemingway's brief high school jour-
nalism could have prepared him. "They worked us very
hard," Hemingway remembered thirty-five years later, "es-
pecially Saturday nights. I liked to work hard though, and
I liked all the special and extra work." His zeal, of course,
would have been no surprise to his editors on the Star; it
was what they expected to get from every young reporter
lucky enough to work for the Star. They expected too that
sixty-dollar-a-month cubs would quickly master the paper's
celebrated style sheet.

This was a long, galley-size, single page containing the
110 rules that governed the Star's prose. It had been devel-
oped by the man who made the Star, the legendary Colonel
Nelson, and two of his first editors, T. W. Johnston and
Alexander Butts. To it had been added the discoveries about
reportorial frailty of successive Star editors. It survives to-
day, printed now in the pamphlet form which has become
standard practice on good newspapers; although, then as
now, it contained the customary local prohibitions and idio-
syncrasies of particular editors, it was in its essentials a
remarkable document. The Star included several rules
which went far beyond the conventional instruction in
spelling, punctuation, and grammar. These were the rules
which made a Star training memorable. The style sheet's
first paragraph and it remains the initial paragraph in the
current style book might well stand as the First Com-
mandment in the prose creed which is today synonymous
with the surface characteristics of Hemingway's work.

KANSAS CITY 31

Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use
vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.

Nothing Hemingway might learn in the next decade of
apprenticeship would supplant this precept. The inevitable
verbosity he had brought from high school theme-writing,
despite the efforts of Miss Dixon and Miss Biggs, as well
as the prose vices of premature independence in Trapeze
reporting, could not survive in such an atmosphere. Rule
1 was an edict observed with evangelical devotion by the
Star's copyreaders and, more important, by the man who
was most directly in contact with young reporters and their
work.

C. G. (Pete) Wellington was in 1917 the assistant city
editor of the Star. He is regarded by the scores of writers
whom he has trained as the man who was the keeper of
the Star style sheet. He was in the direct line of descent
from Nelson, having been hired away from the Topeka
Capitol in 1912 by the colonel's lieutenants. In the early
1940's, when it became necessary to expand the old style
sheet, it was Wellington by then managing editor to
whom the chore was automatically handed.

For him it was no chore. Accuracy and readability were
his twin gods. If a particular point was not covered by the
style sheet, one could be sure in 1917 that the assistant city
editor could supply a principle. In the hands of such a man
patient, severe, devoted to the paper in general and to
readable, lucid prose in particular the style sheet was never
a rhetorical prison. It was a kind of bellows with which
words were controlled and structured. For most of the
Star's reporters the style sheet and its phrases remained in
their minds long after they had left Kansas City. Heming-
way who w r orked there for only seven months could
recall in 1952 that "you were never to say a man was seri-
ously injured. All injuries are serious. He was, as I recall,

$L ERNEST HEMINGWAY

slightly injured or dangerously injured. There were many
other things like this," he added, "that made extremely good
sense." Hemingway then translated his memories of the
style sheet into another idiom, giving his description the
kind of freshness that would have pleased Wellington.

"They gave you this to study when you went to work,"
Hemingway explained, "and after that you were just as
responsible for having learned it as after you've had the
articles of war read to you."

Wellington's young reporters invariably reacted posi-
tively to this atmosphere of diligent and thoughtful pro-
fessionalism. If one worked even briefly in this world where
short sentences and vigorous English were truly important
things, then he would, fundamentally, write that way for-
ever, just as he would always write with the emphasis on
freshness and originality. They used to say that on the Star
you could write a story backwards if you made it interest-
ing enough. This becomes believable when Rule 3 of the
style sheet is analyzed.

Never use old slang. Such words as stunt, cut out, get his
goat, come across, sit up and take notice, put one over, have
no place after their use becomes common. Slang to be en-
joyable must be fresh.

At a time when the habits of a vocation are formed,
Hemingway was being given the training that would make
him so apt a pupil during the coming five or six years.
Language and words could never from this point on be
lightly regarded. The effort would always be toward au-
thenticity, precision, immediacy. There was a legend on
the Star that the city desk once accepted in a reporter's
story the line, "He hit the girl he was engaged to's brother."
The myth vividly indicates what was wanted by the Star
and, above all, by assistant city editor Pete Wellington.

KANSAS CITY 33

Hemingway's sense of obligation to Wellington has always
been profound, and he has recorded it scrupulously on
several occasions. "Pete Wellington was a stern discipli-
narian, very just and very harsh," Hemingway said once,
"and I can never say properly how grateful I am to have
worked under him."

Wellington has been described by the playwright Russel
Grouse on the Star's sports desk in 1917 and a friend of
Hemingway there as a fine teacher because "he had the
wonderful habit of putting his arm around you and then
talking to you as though he was a friend instead of a boss."
This was the man who read Hemingway's copy and dis-
cussed it with him, whether it was merely the phoned-in
facts of a General Hospital stabbing, or a story written by
the boy on his return to the city room. It was the kind of
teaching, bolstering as it did the creed of the style sheet,
and a tradition of great Star stories and reporters of the
past, which was invaluable. Each of the Star's rules becomes
more meaningful to the importance of the period to Hem-
ingway when it is thought of as being explained to the boy
by Wellington. The assistant city editor was particularly
insistent on the observance of Rule 2 1 :

Avoid the use of adjectives, especially such extravagant
ones as splendid, gorgeous, grand, magnificent, etc.

Wellington translated this into an understandable prose
code for his young reporters, just as, when they violated
the Star's edict on short sentences, he would shrug and say,
without rancor but severely, "Why the hell do you want
to tangle your reader up? Do you like listening to someone
who talks like that?" 4 American journalism was just emerg-
ing from a period of heavy, turgid prose. Like the Star
rules, Wellington's careful, frugal use of adjectives, in

W ERNEST HEMINGWAY

which the fresh and evocative was always sought, was evi-
dence of the Star's creative attitude toward prose.

"Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business
of writing," Hemingway told a young newspaperman in
1940. "Fve never forgotten them. No man with any talent,
who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to
say, can fail to write well if he abides by them." 5

77.

Hemingway scrambled eagerly through this professional
world. Thinking back to what gave Hemingway his drive
on the Star in 1917, Dale Wilson, a contemporary there
who later became Sunday editor of the Milwaukee Journal,
decided that his friend "would have been satisfied to be the
top assignment man on the Star and merit the approval of
Pete Wellington." The others who knew him in Kansas
City also recalled him clearly on the basis of those seven
months of eagerness. They remembered him in terms of his
energy, his charm, and, above all, as someone who wouldn't
sit still.

"He liked action," said Pete Wellington in 1951. "When
he was assigned to the General Hospital he had an irritating
habit of riding off with the first ambulance to go to some
kind of cutting scrape without letting the city desk know
that he was leaving the post uncovered." Wellington felt
this could be related to Hemingway's subsequent work.
"He always wanted to be on the scene himself, and I think
that trait has been evident in his later writings."

Other young Star reporters of the period, most of them
with literary ambitions of their own, were sometimes less
tolerant of Hemingway's bustle. "When Ernest was on the
paper here," according to Landon Laird, a Star veteran who
today conducts its drama column, "he was always bouncing
up to the now departed No. 4 police station at 15th and

KANSAS CITY 35

Walnut to ride squad cars with Officer Bauswell and others.
Bauswell was a character, and much more productive of
the excitement in which Ernest revelled than a city room
possibly could be." John Selby, the novelist and editor, re-
membered Hemingway as "forever disappearing into the
receiving ward of the city hospital or onto the tail of an
ambulance."

It took Hemingway a few weeks to maneuver that Gen-
eral Hospital assignment, however. Until he acquired it he
was restless and "not too satisfied," said Frances Davis, who
shared the Federal Building beat with him before becoming
better known as Frances Lockridge of Mr. and Mrs. North
fame. "He wanted to ride ambulances." When he got the
assignment it meant he had survived the Star's thirty-day
trial period; he was no longer on probation. His new beat
was not by any means a sinecure. "You had to be pretty
fair to get away with it," according to Clifford Knight,
who covered the General Hospital himself and then made
the familiar Star transition into a successful novelist. Hem-
ingway was now a reporter. Russel Grouse, not given to
exaggeration, later declared that he was "a good reporter."

"I covered the short-stop run," Hemingway said in 1952,
"which included the 15th Street police station, the Union
Station and the General Hospital." Hemingway remem-
bered the small details of his daily routine. "At the 15th
Street station you covered crime, usually small, but you
never knew when you might hit something larger. Union
Station was everybody going in and out of town . . . some
shady characters I got to know, and interviews with celeb-
rities going through." The third area of his beat was the
one where he found most of his action. "The General Hos-
pital was up a long hill from the Union Station and there
you got accidents and a double check on crimes of vio-
lence." On another occasion, more than twenty years after
he left the Star, even his senses could respond to a discussion

36 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

of the paper, and he talked to an interviewer about how
"when the fog came in the fall, you could see Hospital hill
pushing up, almost smelling its antiseptic concord of
odors/' 6

Wellington, who saw Hemingway at least briefly during
almost every day of his seven months on the paper, remem-
bered him personally and as an attentive pupil. "He was a
big, good-natured boy with a ready smile," Wellington
said years later, "and he developed a friendship with all
those on the staff with whom he came in contact." Wilson
Hicks, a contemporary who became a national magazine
editor, remembered their Kansas City cub days as both
industrious and buoyant. "Ernest was conscientious about
his work," Hicks declared, "but he would also come back
from a story laughing about the people involved, and char-
acterizing them in ways he couldn't write in the paper."

It was Carl Edgar, his friend from Horton Bay, who was
most thoroughly exposed to Hemingway's enthusiasm.
Hemingway had found his uncle's Warwick Boulevard
home too reminiscent of Oak Park; after a few days he
accepted Edgar's offer to share his small apartment. The
older man usually worked late, and since Hemingway had
to be at the Star each morning by eight o'clock, they saw
each other only at night, when they would meet at the
rooms on Agnes Street and discuss the day's affairs. "Hem-
ingway felt the charm and romance of newspaper work
fully," Edgar conceded later. "He would talk for hours
about his work, frequently when it would have been better
to go to bed." Edgar also sensed that Hemingway con-
sidered the job essentially as a means to an end. "I believe
that the writing itself interested him principally," Edgar
maintained. This was also Wellington's analysis, and the
assistant city editor often heard from Hemingway the dra-
matic promise, not unique in a city room, that "he would
write the great American novel."

KANSAS CITY 37

The Star's milieu, in fact, was one in which only the most
perverse of young men could have ignored the writing of
fiction. "Every newspaperman I knew," Russel Grouse re-
called, "was secretly working on a novel." On the Star, too,
there was a factor which did not operate on many papers.
This was the famous institution inaugurated by Colonel
Nelson and known as either the exchange or the literary
department. Nelson had insisted that considerable space be
given in the Star to reprints of modern and classical liter-
ature, and to masterpieces of art. The literary department
clipped magazines, quoted from new books and old, and
ransacked American and foreign newspapers for material
that would both interest and elevate subscribers to the
paper.

A young man who worked on the Star learned to write
declarative sentences, and to avoid hackneyed adjectives,
and to tell an interesting narrative; and, because of the
literary department, he learned to do these things in a school
which was interested in a more complex aspect of writing
than the mere coverage of the day's events. "The editorial
room of the Star" said Clifford Knight, the detective story
writer who worked for the Star for more than ten years,
both before and after Hemingway's tenure there, "was
something more than just another newspaper. There was an
atmosphere there that was unique." In 1952 it was still
vivid in his mind. "There were good men there in the top
spots, as good as there were in the business, and after the
paper went to press and things slacked off, you could go
and talk to almost anybody; you could dream dreams and
talk about the novel you were going to write some day."

Literary critics have sometimes patronized Hemingway
as the victim of an abbreviated and inadequate education.
On the contrary, in addition to the admirable instruction
given at Oak Park High, he was the recipient of an ex-
tremely literate and concentrated training, general as well

38 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

as vocational, on the Star. It was an education to which,
like any young man, he would be more attentive than he
would have been to similar instruction at, say, the Univer-
sity of Illinois. 'The Star" according to Clifford Knight,
who grew up in its circulation belt before he joined its
staff, "was a cultural bath." It served this function both for
those who read it and for those who wrote it.

No matter how single-mindedly he pursued ambulances,
a young man could not be unaffected by such an atmo-
sphere. This was not the dipsomaniacal city room that
Hollywood invented, nor was it the monotony which is
frequently the American newspaper of reality. "It was
literate and alert," John Selby testified in 1952. "People did
read, not only the current stuff, but generally. The shop
bristled with novels being written."

It would be naive to imagine, however, that Hemingway
spent all his time in the literary department. He was already
doubtful of whatever was not experienced. The exchange
department, had he thought consciously about it, would
have seemed to a degree a quaint make-believe. Hemingway
belonged only occasionally to the group which discussed
literature and art in reverent, almost academic terms. Al-
though some of his friends were among those who gathered
regularly with John Patrick Gilday and the older men from
the literary department, and though he himself was respon-
sively interested in fiction of all kinds, Hemingway, when
the paper was put to bed, turned to a spokesman of a differ-
ent approach to fiction.

Lionel Calhoun Moise became a legend in American city
rooms by the time he was thirty. 7 During the rest of his life
the legend extended in depth of anecdote without changing
its essential pattern. Witnesses to Aloise's career are invari-

KANSAS CITY 39

ably in doubt as to whether it was his talent as a writer or
his color as a personality which contributed most strongly
to their memory of him.

Of his stature as a journalist they were never in doubt.
Experienced colleagues, who had read a thousand perishable
accounts of the day's events, always remembered one or
two by Moise when the rest had blurred away. He had the
kind of agile talent which once enabled him to write three
hundred entertaining words every day for a month on the
phenomenon of Halley's comet. He is preserved in the
minds of his contemporaries as a symbol of a vanished
species, the boomer, the nomad reporter who acknowledged
no master, moving turbulently from job to job, able neither
to write a dull story nor be a dull companion. He was
notorious as a cop-slugger and barroom brawler, a Front
Page character who, in Russel Grouse's memory, "was a
good tough reporter of the old school who loved to get
drunk and throw typewriters out the windows."

The anecdotes about his brawls and his drinking and his
women were legion. Defining the relationship between
Moise and Hemingway, a contemporary concluded that if
Hemingway had written his fiction before 1917, younger
newspapermen in Kansas City might have described Moise
as "like a character out of Hemingway." Hemingway re-
membered him in 1952, the year of his death, as "a very
picturesque, dynamic, big-hearted, hard-drinking and hard-
fighting man," adding that he (Hemingway) had "always
regretted that his talent was not disciplined and canalized
into good writing."

Moise, as Hemingway inferred by that brief epitaph,
was more than just a dissolute, professional he-man. "If
Hemingway learned anything on the Star" according to
Wesley Stout, a famous Kansas City reporter who later
became editor of the Saturday Evening Post, "it was from
Moise, whose footsteps he dogged. Moise had many theories

40 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

about writing, which he was not unwilling to share." Moise
was particularly emphatic on the requirements of good
prose. His description of his own work is an excellent indi-
cation of what he taught Hemingway. He was fond of
pointing out that copyreaders hated to read his stories be-
cause he wrote transition sentences to tie each paragraph
tightly to its predecessor. "Not," he explained to another
of the Star cubs who always surrounded him, "these
choppy, bastard, journalese paragraphs that can be cut out
easily when a story had to be shortened."

He was, for all his romanticism and his saloon gregarious-
ness, a sharply critical man, capable of expressing his beliefs
in pungent epigram. "It is a regrettable indication of a great
nation's literary taste," he once said, "when it chooses a
national anthem beginning with the words, 'Oh, say.' " His
advice to the young reporters was always the same; it is the
precise advice Hemingway has continued to give novices.
Moise urged an ambitious associate to quit his job on the
overstaffed Star and take one with the Kansas City Journal.
"With its ridiculously small staff," he explained, "the Jour-
nal will run you ragged with writing reams of copy and
the only way to improve your writing is to write."

Moise's temperament and creed had an understandable
appeal for Hemingway. He and the older man became
good friends. Russel Grouse told another Star associate, in
1930, that his own most vivid recollection of Hemingway
in Kansas City was as "a companion of dat ole davil Moise."
From Moise and from others like him, "storybook news-
papermen," Wilson Hicks recalled, "men like Tod Ormis-
ton and Harry Godfrey" Hemingway received aspects of
a set of attitudes toward experience, as well as a pattern of
writing habits he could add to the more important ones he
was acquiring from the Star's atmosphere in general and
from Pete Wellington in particular. Moise was blunt and
doctrinaire on the qualities which fiction must possess.

KANSAS CITY 41

"Pure objective writing," Moise often said, "is the only
true form of storytelling." The writers he admired were
Saint-Simon, Mark Twain, Conrad, Kipling, and Dreiser.
"No stream of consciousness nonsense; no playing dumb
observer one paragraph and God Almighty the next." He
would lean forward emphatically, an impressive and per-
suasive lecturer. "In short, no tricks." Moise, unlike others
to whom Hemingway was temporarily indebted, neither
envied nor belittled the younger man's success. "I have
since heard Hemingway quoted," Moise said in 1952, in
one of the last letters he wrote, "to the effect that this and
other pronouncements influenced him for the good."
Moise's ironic wit was still active. "But," he added, "he
probably was not himself." Growing more serious, Moise
was literate and assured in his analysis of Hemingway's
work. "Like all real writers, Hemingway owes his well-
deserved eminence not to any 'influence' but to his ability
to select from a host of influences part of that little thing
called genius." He had read Hemingway's stories with care
and approval. " 'The Killers' is an example of pure objec-
tivity; dialogue, action, and a minimum of description."

Moise's importance to Hemingway, though by no means
as lasting and crucial as Pete Wellington's, was sharp and
direct. Almost half a century after he broke in Moise as a
green cub on the Star, Marvin Creager, his first city editor,
remembered that even then Moise had "a flair for the intel-
lectual and a thirst for knowledge." Creager, who subse-
quently became editor of the Milwaukee Journal and made
it one of the great Midwestern dailies, remembered too that
Moise read widely and "understandingly." He could con-
centrate on "things that most cub reporters would find
heavy going." As a combination of tutors Wellington and
Moise complemented each other in a way that would have
been hard to duplicate. Their mutual concern with Hem-
ingway the one's official and stern, the other's friendly

42 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

and convivial made the Star another profitable step in ap-
prenticeship. Wellington was a natural teacher to whom
the entire staff looked for guidance and praise; Moise, as
a contemporary remembered him, was "the idol of all the
cubs." It was a formidable piece of good fortune; Heming-
way, above all, was an apt and industrious pupil.

IV.

One of Wellington's clearest memories of Hemingway
on the Star was that he took "great pains" with his work.
Wellington recalled specifically that he labored carefully
in fashioning "even the one-paragraph news story." Here
again the Star offered a discipline not characteristic of
American papers. Its treatment of news stories lent itself
to a prose exercise of which Hemingway, determined as he
was to learn to write, was in desperate need.

Every page of the Star including the front page was
jammed with stories. Page one, with its unorthodox seven
columns, seldom contained in 1917 and 1918 more than
three or four long stories. The rest of the page was filled
with as many as twenty-five items of one or two para-
graphs. They might be of state, national, or international
origin, but as a rule most of them were locally derived and
written by any one of the staff reporters. These were
the one-paragraph stories over which Wellington recalled
Hemingway toiling. They demonstrate the paper's crisp,
declarative style as well as its stress on the colloquial. They
show Wellington's insistence that narrative be clear and
interesting and precise. In 1940, just after the publication
of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway told an inter-
viewer that during his seven months on the Star he was
trying to tell simple things simply. He remembered that he
had been "enormously excited under Pete Wellington's
guidance to learn that the English language yields to sim-

KANSAS CITY 43

plicity through brevity." 8 Hemingway was especially in-
debted, he declared, to Wellington's concept of flexible
narrative rather than the rigidly inverted, conventional news
story, with its artificial dogma of lead, secondary lead, and
key qualification points. In some ways as indicated in this
front page story of March, 1918, typical of the kind over
which Hemingway labored the Star was training its staff
in narrative as much as in reportage.

A well dressed young woman entered the jewelry divi-
sion of the welfare loan agency yesterday. She presented
a worn pawn ticket. It was for a wedding ring pawned nine
months before.

"I never intended to come back for that," she said. "I
didn't wear it and it always seemed just an expression of
sentiment and I believed I was an unsentimental woman.
But my husband was drafted and I thought I'd like to have
the ring to remember him by in case he never comes
home." 9

The most rudimentary extension would alter this kind
of Star paragraph into the fragmentary sketches Heming-
way was producing five years later in such work as "A
Very Short Story" and "The Revolutionist." 10 The Star
stressed reader interest far more than it emphasized the
traditional and confining who, what, where, and when
of conventional journalism. The city desk also encouraged
the use of dialogue, and insisted that the speech have authen-
ticity and crispness. The news section carried at this time,
for example and presented as a straight news story an
account of the trial of a Negro woman accused of operating
a confidence game. Having explained briefly that the pris-
oner specialized in love-crossed matrons, the Star's reporter
focused on the central character.

44 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

"Fse Alicka, the Wonder Woman," she told her clients.
"Tell your fortune, bring back your lovers, fix everything
up, all for a quarter. Cross my palm, lady; cross my palm." 11

Alicka swindled the woman out of not only her quarter
but also a considerable amount of jewelry. Greedy at the
spectacle of this easy victim, Alicka returned later and was
apprehended by a policeman. The latter accused her bluntly
of theft.

"You're right, copper," Alicka answered. "Take me
along. You fool men all time butting in and spoiling every-
thing."

She pleaded guilty and was fined fifty dollars; dispatched
to the state farm for female offenders, she said to the judge,
according to the Star's story: "That ain't so bad. I'll charm
them fool niggers at the farm. Watch Alicka."

Frequently the now characteristic, undercut Heming-
way climax, full of unstated, ironic implications, was
coupled in these Star paragraphs with the blunt, declara-
tive idiom on which Wellington insisted.

A warrant charging Joseph C. Wirthman, who owns
several drug stores in Kansas City, with selling liquor with-
out a license was issued by the prosecutor today. The
complaint was made by George Herne, representative of
the Society for Suppression of Commercialized Vice.

Wirthman was arrested and pleaded not guilty. He
waived preliminary hearing and trial was set for August
13 before Judge Ralph S. Latshaw. He was released on
$500 bond signed by his attorney.

Herne said he bought a 25-cent bottle of whiskey in
Wirthman's store at Thirty-first Street and Troost Avenue
July 1. Herne complained to Shannon C. Douglas, assistant

KANSAS CITY 45

prosecutor, that several men, whom he recognized as Sec-
ond Ward politicians, followed him to the Criminal Court
Building today and threatened him. Wirthman is a former
alderman. 12

When Hemingway was preparing himself intensely at
the end of his apprenticeship for the heavier burden ot
full-length fiction, he conceived the exercises which were
eventually published as a group in the expatriate volume,
in our time, in 1924. The relationship is explicit between
these important creative experiments and the short news
paragraphs Hemingway wrote for Pete Wellington in 1917
and 1918. In 1924, in fact, Hemingway went back to his
Star instruction not only for the method but also on two
occasions for the material itself. Save for the minor licenses
permitted a fictionalist, they might be the very items
known on some American papers as brighteners which
daily enlivened the Star. They contain all the characteristics
Pete Wellington valued, sharpened now by the five years
of Hemingway's subsequent apprenticeship. Hemingway
had retained the entire technique of the Star, even to the
idiosyncrasies of spelling and the terminology of streets
and precinct.

At two o'clock in the morning two Hungarians got into
a cigar store at Fifteenth Street and Grand Avenue. Drev-
itts and Boyle drove up from the Fifteenth Street police
station in a Ford. The Hungarians were backing their
wagon out an alley. Boyle shot one off the seat of the
wagon and one out of the wagon box. Drevitts got fright-
ened when he found they were both dead. Hell Jimmy, he
said, you oughtn't to have done it. There's liable to be a
hell of a lot of trouble. 13

In the second 1924 exercise based on Star material and
methodology, Hemingway described the old Jackson

46 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

County jail at Missouri Avenue and Oak Street. William
Moorhead, the Star's police reporter for forty years, who
took Hemingway with him on a number of assignments in
1918, found Hemingway's picture "an accurate description
of the dismal, massive brick building." Hemingway several
times mentioned to friends a Kansas City criminal with the
same name as the central figure of this hanging scene. "They
hanged Sam Cardinella at six o'clock in the morning in the
corridor of the county jail," Hemingway began the 1924
sketch. 14 The abrupt exposition was only one of several
stylistic reminders of Wellington's teaching.

Even during his brief seven months on the Star Heming-
way wrote a number of stories which startled his associates
by their effectiveness and maturity. As was always the
practice, such successes were an occasion for general con-
gratulation; it was the cherished compensation for the low
salaries and rare by-lines. Hemingway received the acco-
lade several times, in particular for a story which he him-
self remembered, many years later, as "very sad, about a
whore." It was a simple vignette of a shabby girl who
walked back and forth, weeping, outside a soldiers' dance
sponsored by a socially prominent local organization. The
girl intently watched a particular soldier as he danced with
his smartly dressed partners. Hemingway's exposition was
wholly implicit; he avoided both sentimentality and cheap-
ness. The treatment was instinctive anticipation of one of
the strengths of his later work. The story impressed George
Longan, the city editor, as much as it did Wellington. There
were enthusiastic prophecies about the eighteen-year-old
boy's journalistic future.

Hemingway himself had a more realistic, vocational mem-
ory of the story. "It was around then they decided maybe
I should be allowed to write occasionally as well as tele-
phone." The incident increased both his stature on the
paper and his conviction that he could write well if he

KANSAS CITY 47

worked hard enough at it. He became a close friend of the
assignment editor of the Star's morning edition, the Times,
and when he finished his own assignments he would cover
stories for Charlie Hopkins. Hopkins was always short-
handed; he made the most of such a windfall. He became
very fond of Hemingway, and about this time had a long
talk with the boy concerning his future. When Heming-
way was back in Oak Park in May, 1918, he told Fannie
Biggs a little bit about that conversation with Hopkins.
"Don't let anyone ever say that you were taught writing,"
Hopkins had told him. "It was born in you."

It was a pleasant thing to hear, of course, but Heming-
way was already too sophisticated in his trade to really be-
lieve it. He had been taught a great deal at the Star. Now
he was ready to move on to another lesson. The war was
still very much on his mind. Although he had been turned
down twelve times by the medical examiners of various
units, he suddenly got the break he had been hoping for.

V.

It was another Star friendship which led Hemingway
into the war. Ted Brumback was the son of a socially
prominent Kansas City family. An undergraduate at Cornell
from 1913 through 1915, he had left college for a year after
a golfing accident that cost him an eye. He returned to
Cornell for the academic year 1916-17, but at the close of
the spring term, in spite of his vision, he was accepted by
the American Field Service as an ambulance driver. He was
on active service in France from July until November of
1917. His enlistment up, he returned to Kansas City, a
glamorous figure who had served with the Chasseurs Al-
pins. Brumback, with his local connections and literary
ambitions, had no difficulty obtaining a cub reporter's job
on the Star. Hemingway, a dynamo of furious energy at

48 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

an office typewriter, attracted Brumback's attention on his
first day in the city room.

"Every tenth letter or so," Brumback wrote later, "would
print above the type line. He didn't seem to mind. Nor did
he mind when the two keys would jam." 15 Hemingway
finished abruptly and called for a copy boy. He turned to
Brumback. "That's rotten looking copy," Hemingway said.
"When I get a little excited this damn type mill goes hay-
wire on me." He got up and held out his hand. "My name's
Hemingway," he told Brumback. "Ernest Hemingway.
You're a new man, aren't you?"

The two young men became close friends. Years later,
in the 1930's, Brumback was traveling in California, wan-
dering casually in a battered Ford, when he encountered
another ex-reporter from the Star. One of the first things
Brumback mentioned was that he had not only known the
author of A Farewell to Arms, but had shared the same
tent with him in Italy, and, he said, "had seen and done
everything that Hemingway did over there." In 1936,
when he wrote for the Star a brief memoir of his friend-
ship with Hemingway, Brumback described him in much
the same terms as had his other Kansas City contemporaries.
"He was a big, handsome kid," Brumback wrote, "bubbling
over with energy. And this energy was really remarkable.
He could turn out more copy than any two reporters." 16

Brumback told Hemingway, of course, about his experi-
ences in France, and so as early as Christmas, 1917, Hem-
ingway was talking to Carl Edgar about joining some sort
of ambulance unit. In April the opportunity finally pre-
sented itself. Hemingway and Brumback were able to cap-
italize on it, appropriately, because of their connection
with the Star. The legend was that when one day a wire
service story came to the telegraph desk, dealing with the
Red Cross's need for volunteers with the Italian Army, the
two young men cabled applications before the paper used

KANSAS CITY 49

the item. Wilson Hicks, who had also been part of their
plan, decided at the last moment to stay in Kansas City and
wait for the American army. On April 30, 1918, therefore,
Hemingway and Brumback drew their last pay from the
Star. Together with Carl Edgar and Charlie Hopkins, the
Times's assignment editor, they went up to northern Michi-
gan for a final fishing trip.

From Kansas City Hemingway took with him not only
the lessons he had learned about writing but also a trained
reporter's eye which would enable him to profit consider-
ably more from his Italian experiences than if, for example,
he had been able to enlist directly from high school the
previous June. He took with him too a reservoir of material
upon which he could draw when he began his serious writ-
ing in 1919. The two harshly moving short stories, "A
Pursuit Race" and "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen," are
the memorable harvest of his Star assignments. 17 Prior to
their publication in 1927 and 1933 he had written what he
later called "some good stories about Kansas City" which
were lost, without carbons, in the late fall of 1922. 18 Even
in 1952, when he was asked about his memories of Kansas
City, Hemingway was still planning to go back to the
period for material.

"I was always going to write about Kansas City myself,"
he said. "I know it just as it was then." Those had been
seven lucky months in 1917 and 1918; Hemingway had
made the most of them. He was better prepared for a part
of his apprenticeship which would be in its way equally
important to him.

CHAPTER
III

ITALY

"It was a hell of a war as I recall.
But a damned sight better than no war
at all."

Mademoiselle from Armentieres

Hemingway and Brumback were in New York, waiting
for a ship to Europe, by the second week of May, 1918.
Their orders had been forwarded from Kansas City to
Horton Bay; they left hastily for Manhattan, still wearing
their fishing clothes. The Red Cross issued their uniforms
on May 12 and enlisted them as honorary lieutenants. A
week later the unit was part of a Fifth Avenue parade
marching downtown from 82nd Street to the Battery
and was reviewed by President and Mrs. Wilson. Heming-
way was jubilant about finally getting into the war; Brum-
back remembered him as "delirious with excitement." 1

Back in Kansas City the paper had printed pictures of its
two former reporters and a paragraph or two about their
personal histories, declaring prematurely that the pair would
sail that week "from an Atlantic port for Italy." 2 The
article stressed Brumback's previous service in France and
Hemingway's persistent campaign to deceive medical ex-
aminers about his own imperfect eyesight. Although few
of the new drivers had been forced to exercise Heming-
way's tenacity of martial purpose, they were nevertheless
an enthusiastic and enterprising group. Hemingway, at

ITALY 51

eighteen, was one of the youngest. In 1920, in fact, when
he was working on a newspaper in Toronto, a Canadian
reporter concluded that the American's exceptional matu-
rity must have come from a wartime association with older
men. Brumback, his closest friend in the unit, would nor-
mally have graduated from Cornell the previous year.
William D. Home, Jr., a young New York businessman
with whom both Brumback and Hemingway quickly be-
came friendly, had been a member of the Class of 1913 at
Princeton. Most of the unit had either attended or finished
college. Even Zalmon Simmons, Jr., an heir to the mattress
fortune, although he was young enough to have been a
prep school senior in 1917, had the advantage of an earlier
enlistment in France with the American Field Service.

The Red Cross ambulance corps in Italy was modeled on
the American Field Service units. All the original personnel
in Italy, for whom Hemingway's group had been signed on
as replacements, had been recruited in Paris from men who
had served with the Field Service ambulances in France.
The structure and atmosphere of the American Field Serv-
ice, with its heroic record of work with the French, dom-
inated this new world into which Hemingway was being
initiated. Its history clarifies the Italian milieu.

The American Field Service and its successor, the Red
Cross ambulance corps in which Hemingway served, testi-
fied to the humanitarian impulse which was so strong a
factor in American attitudes toward, and participation in,
World War I. The impulse has been obscured by the sub-
sequent disillusion of that generation and by the shamefaced
skepticism with which many of them later regarded their
youthful idealism. The novels and plays of the 1920's told
their bitter narratives in such sardonic terms that the mem-

52 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

ory of World War I has become an embarrassment. War-
time slogans were soon endowed with irony as though no
good had ever existed in them. In reality, whether they
went overseas with such advance units as the Field Service
and the Red Cross, or whether they enlisted in more con-
ventional military units, the bulk of Hemingway's genera-
tion traveled east in the crusading idealism of their Pres-
ident. This is verified by an examination of such American
volunteers as Hemingway and his associates and predeces-
sors.

The volunteer organizations had from the beginning a
strongly literary and academic background. 3 One of their
first sponsors was Henry James. In November, 1914, Mac-
millan published in London and sold for a penny a
twelve-page pamphlet by the novelist called The American
Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps in France. James, ad-
dressing himself to "the editor of an American journal,"
told of the work of Richard Norton of Boston, founder of
the corps, and appealed to other Americans for funds and
vehicles with which to continue the work. The pamphlet
was distinctly in the prose of James's late period. He de-
scribed the suffering of the wounded. "Carried mostly by
rude arts, a mercy much hindered at the best, to the shelter,
often hastily improvised, at which first aid becomes possible
for them, they are there, as immediately and tenderly as
possible, stowed in our waiting or arriving Cars, each of
which receives as large a number as may be consistent with
the particular suffering state of the stricken individual."

James had touched immediately on one of the basic ele-
ments of the entire volunteer episode. It was a spirit of
humanitarianism which moved Richard Norton and the
several thousand who followed him during the next four
years. These Americans were profoundly disturbed by the
suffering of the wounded. Norton's ambulances, replacing
the slow, springless horse-drawn wagons of the hard-pressed

ITALY 53

French Transport Corps, as the Red Cross would later come
to the aid of the Italian command, were able to get the
wounded from the first-aid stations in a matter of minutes.
Late in 1915, though it continued to receive assistance from
England's St. John Ambulance, Norton's unit became for-
mally associated with the American Red Cross. They had
carried 28,000 wounded, and, as Norton wrote to his
brother in New York, "our cars relieved the suffering of
over six thousand individuals between September 25 and
October 9." When the United States declared war in April,
1917, there were more than one hundred Red Cross am-
bulances on the western front.

The American Field Service, in which so many of Hem-
ingway's fellow volunteers in Italy had served, developed
along the same general pattern as had Norton's unit and
the smaller, independent, Morgan-Harjes group. Section
One of the Field Service went on duty in Alsace in April,
1915. By 1916, at the time of the Verdun emergencies, the
unit was operating one hundred and twenty-five ambu-
lances, donated by American philanthropy and manned by
American drivers. The enlistment of almost exclusively
undergraduate or recently graduated personnel was already
well established. Hemingway's own section in Italy con-
tained a high proportion of college men, from institutions
as diverse as Stanford, Princeton, Boston University, Illi-
nois, the University of California, Dartmouth, and Pennsyl-
vania State College.

This was the characteristic which impressed John Mase-
field, who was sent to France in 1917 by the British Gov-
ernment to inspect the American volunteers. "These drivers
are men of high education," he wrote in Harper's. "They
are the very pick and flower of American life, some of
them professional men, but the greater number of them
young men on the threshold of life, lads just down from
college or in their last student years." Membership in the

54 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

various ambulance groups was an extension and renewal of
high school and college, with a fraternity aspect that in-
cluded the hazing of new men, the publication of collegiate-
like newspapers, and the celebration at the front of Yale's
upset victory over Harvard in 1916. The volunteers prac-
ticed the martial truth enunciated by one of Evelyn
Waugh's characters in 1940. "Most of war seems to consist
of hanging about," says the young Commando officer in
Put Out More Flags. "Let's at least hang about with our
own friends."

The camaraderie was intensified by the nature of the
work and the organization of the corps. The Red Cross
ambulance unit in Italy was divided into five sections. The
sections were small enough less than fifty men, in the
case of Hemingway's Section IV 4 so that real intimacy
naturally developed. The friendship which emerged in
Section IV between Hemingway and Bill Home remained
an active one for many years. Several of the other drivers
made a point of looking up Hemingway in Paris in the
very early 1920's, long before he had become a celebrity.
A number of the members of Section IV settled in or
returned to Chicago after the war; although few of them
had any direct business relations, they continued to hold
informal Ambulance dinners for the next thirty-five years.
Their service in Italy was not only an absorbing adven-
ture; by and large it was one of the most memorable of
their experiences.

It was also difficult, responsible, and frequently danger-
ous. The hours varied according to the particular require-
ments of the sector. When the work was light, the shift
was twenty-four hours on, twenty-four off. "During the
busiest periods," according to the Red Cross's Report
of the Department of Military Affairs in Italy, the
work was "divided evenly between the nights and the
days." In the case of night attack periods, of course and

ITALY 55

Hemingway's service coincided with the July counter-
offensive along the lower Piave the cars were driven
without lights. In their letters and diaries the drivers ex-
pressed again and again their horror when at the end of
a long drive, under shelling, they discovered they had been
driving not an ambulance but a hearse. "These are nights
that bear no relation to reality," one of them wrote. "Morn-
ing comes like the relief from pain."

Later it became fashionable to mock those writers who
had been in the ambulance service, and to treat their over-
seas service as a comfortable, rather ridiculous sinecure.
"With the Ambulance Boys in France and Italy/' com-
mentators sneered in the 1930's, reducing the experience
to the level of juvenile tales of adventure. Some of the
volunteers themselves took this attitude, as if ashamed of
an ill-advised chapter of their youth. Hemingway, char-
acteristically confident of the evidence of his own mem-
ories of Italy, resisted belligerently the shifting climate of
opinion in 1935.

I thought . . . about what a great advantage an experience
of war was to a writer. It was one of the major subjects
and certainly one of the hardest to write truly of and those
writers who had not seen it were always very jealous and
tried to make it seem unimportant, or abnormal, or a dis-
ease as a subject, while, really, it was just something quite
irreplaceable that they had missed. 5

Hemingway, crossing the Atlantic in late May of 1918
to join this atmosphere of adventure and service, in which
he would take his first lessons in war, made the most of
whatever excitement was available. The Chicago, a vener-
able possession of the French Line, was traveling without

56 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

destroyer escort. Hemingway was delighted with the ru-
mors of a U-boat operating along the American coast; he
and Brumback stood expectantly on the blacked-out deck. 6
Nothing happened. The Chicago was in every way a dis-
appointment. There was little to occupy the monotonous
trip except poker in the bar, where the game was the
twenty-four-hour one of all troopships, or a crap game
with allies who might cover you in French, English, Belgian,
Italian, or American money. "Hemingway tried it," Brum-
back wrote later, "but found he was behind, although he'd
won." Once there was a flurry of excitement as they
suddenly changed course. A barrel on a raft had been
sighted; it was said to be the prelude to sinister German
trickery. No lurking sub materialized. "Hemingway,"
Brumback said in 1936, "felt he'd been cheated."

His disappointment was softened by their arrival in Paris
in the midst of the first shelling of the city by Big Bertha,
the new, long-range German gun. At the Gare du Nord
Hemingway gave Brumback his instructions. "Tell the
taxi," he commanded his friend, "to drive up where those
shells are falling. We'll get a story for the Star that'll make
their eyes pop out back in Kansas City." A heavy tip to
the driver allowed them to begin what Brumback recalled,
with restraint, as "one of the strangest taxi drives I shall
probably ever experience." They spent over an hour driv-
ing through Paris trying to catch up with the bursts.
Finally they succeeded. "The shell hit the facade of the
Madeleine," Brumback wrote, "chipping off a foot or so of
stone." Perhaps by design, or perhaps merely by virtue of
his own Star training, Brumback described the incident in
1936 in a facsimile of Hemingway's own prose. "No one
was hurt. We heard the projectile rush overhead. It sounded
as if it were going to land right in the taxi with us. It was
quite exciting."

Paris, after they had exhausted the possibilities of Big

ITALY 57

Bertha, soon became as monotonous as the Chicago. "This
is getting to be a bore," Hemingway told Brumback. "I
wish they'd hurry and ship us off to the front." A day or
two later, fortunately, they did leave for Italy; by the
middle of June Hemingway was sending excited postcards
to Kansas City. The frustrations of bogus U-boats were
forgotten. From Milan they were hurried by truck on an
emergency basis to a scene of complete devastation outside
the city. "Having a wonderful time!!!" Hemingway wrote
back to a friend on the Star. "Had my baptism of fire my
first day here, when an entire munition plant exploded." 7
His use of the cliche was probably in part ironic; his out-
ward response to the catastrophe was not phrased in the
idiom of Henry James and Richard Norton. "We carried
them in," he went on, "like at the General Hospital, Kansas
City."

This was his public personality, however, the bravado his
contemporaries had noticed in him as a reporter, and his
antidote, as well, to the solemnity of the Red Cross atmo-
sphere. The scene made a deep impression on him, so vivid
that he returned to it fourteen years later in his angry, anti-
war story, "A Natural History of the Dead." His 1932
memory of the impressions of the 1918 scene, like his simul-
taneous gibe at the cold, academic humanism of the period,
was harsh and specific. "Regarding the sex of the dead,"
he wrote, "it is a fact that one becomes so accustomed to
the sight of all the dead being men that the sight of a dead
woman is quite shocking. I first saw inversion of the usual
sex of the dead after the explosion of a munition factory
which had been situated in the countryside near Milan,
Italy. ... I remember that after we had searched quite
thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments.
. . . Many fragments we found a considerable distance away
in the fields, they being carried farther by their own
weight." 8

58 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

In 1918, not yet nineteen years old, Hemingway's pri-
mary concern was to find more of the same. "I go to the
front tomorrow," he wrote back to Kansas City. "Oh,
Boy!!! I'm glad I'm in it." y From Milan the entire contin-
gent of twenty-two drivers moved on to Schio, ninety miles
to the east, where they joined Section IV and relieved those
men whose enlistments had expired. Once again, as with
Big Bertha in Paris, their arrival seemed a signal for the
unprecedented. Almost immediately, Brumback recalled,
the Austrians violated an unwritten pledge by which each
side had previously refrained from shelling certain towns.
Schio had been such a town. Hemingway was as excited as
he had been in Paris. "We set off," Brumback remembered,
"running for the [railway] station to get there before the
next shell arrived." The bombardment was over by the time
they reached the target, but Hemingway consoled himself
with the certainty of Italian revenge. "Visiting team's
started playing dirty ball," Hemingway told his friend.
"We'll hear from the home team on that."

Schio itself, in addition to the charm of its lost immunity,
had a special interest for two former reporters. Section IV,
not content with the multitude of Red Cross bulletins issued
in Rome, was publishing its own newspaper. The paper was
printed once a month in nearby Vicenza, under the heartily
macabre name, Ciao, Italian for "good-bye." Ciao's four
pages were in format and treatment a duplication of an
American high school paper. "All the hysterics of Section
IV," the front page promised. 10 Its "Weather Report" was
in the same style: "Clear: with bombing moon, possibility
of sky becoming overcast before morning with planes, with
resulting hail." The June issue, which contained an editorial
urging the new drivers to "uphold the reputation of the
Section," also asked for prose contributions from the re-
cruits. "We know that there is talent among them." Hem-
ingway needed no urging. The very issue which included

ITALY 59

the address of welcome to his group also included a story
in the Lardnerian manner he had last used in the Trapeze
in 1917.

Hemingway's article "Al Receives Another Letter"
was the longest single item in the paper. 11 Its confident
expertness was in sharp contrast to Ciao's conventional para-
graphs of fraternal banter and heavy, Wilsonian purpose.
There was an illusion of effortless flow and a consistency
of treatment that made the article superior to Hemingway's
Oak Park columns. The story was organized with a coher-
ence that stemmed directly from the severe city room and
discipline of Kansas City. The material was particularly
impressive in its display of Hemingway's precocious mastery
of this new milieu. The paragraph exploited the familiar
malapropisms, grammatical distortions, and personal vani-
ties of Lardner's buffoons. These were transferred by
Hemingway, however, with complete authenticity, from
the world of Lardner's Jack O'Keefe and a stateside army
camp into the new atmosphere of the Red Cross ambulance
service.

Well Al we are here in this old Italy and now that I am
here I am not going to leave it. Not at all if any. And that
is not no New Years revolution Al but the truth. Well Al
I am now an officer and if you would meet me you have to
salute me. What I am is a provisional acting second lieu-
tenant without a commission but the trouble is that all the
other fellows are too. There aint no privates in our army
Al and the Captain is called a chef. But he don't look to me
as tho he could cook a damn bit. And the next highest
officer he is called a sou chef. And the reason that they call
him that is that he is chef of the jitneys and has to cook for
the 4ds. But he has a soft job Al because there are only one
4d. lefts.

60 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Hemingway used some of the identical phrases that were
occurring in Lardner's Saturday Evening Post satires in 1918
Jenahvark, for example, and Gerry Baldy and he em-
ployed the same sardonic exposure of the author of the
letter. The story was an excellent one, about eight hundred
words long, and as technically finished as anything Hem-
ingway had yet written. "Do you remember that fellow
Pease Al that I wrote you about what was our captain?
Well he is a p.s.l.A.w.a.c. now just like the rest of us and
he speaks to me pretty regular now and yesterday he darn
near called me by first name. But what are we fighting for
anyway except to make the world safe for the Democrats?"
The satire established Hemingway firmly in the minds of
his companions, several of whom not only recalled the
story, many years later, but also remembered the delight
with which he had written it.

"Al Receives Another Letter" was the extent of Heming-
way's published work during the war, although he persist-
ently thought of himself as a writer, and continued to
write a good deal during the late summer of 1918. One
of the drivers remembered that Hemingway told him he
would have preferred to be a war correspondent, but lacked
the necessary experience. Bill Home, who was interested in
Hemingway's writing from the beginning, declared later
that Hemingway was "writing short stories" during the
period. He remembered that "some of these were good
stories, too," adding, quite rightly, that so far as he knew
"none of those which I read or heard discussed was ever
published." Home also felt that this material could not have
been written during this period with Section IV in late
June; Hemingway, he pointed out, "was awfully busy being
an ambulance driver." The necessary opportunity and leis-
ure were given Hemingway very shortly. He was seriously
wounded on July 8, 1918, and spent the next three months
in the American Red Cross Hospital at Milan.

ITALY 61

IV.

Hemingway was one of the few severe casualties among
the American drivers in Italy. The way in which he was
wounded was an indication both of his eagerness for action
and his genuine desire to serve the Allied cause. Heming-
way, according to Frederick Spiegel, another young Chi-
cagoan with whom he shared several ambulance assign-
ments, was "extremely conscious of the war as a 'crusade
for democracy/ and burning with the desire to have a share
in it." His behavior at Schio documented such testimony.

The area to which they were assigned was enviously
designated by the other sections as the Schio Country Club.
They were quartered on the second floor of an abandoned
woolen mill. In front of the mill was a flat meadow where
the drivers played baseball. Beside the mill was the stream
from which it had previously drawn its power. The Amer-
icans swam and sun-bathed there. Hemingway's reaction to
this routine, broken only by relatively uneventful ambu-
lance runs, was a natural one. The front was near enough
so that he was highly conscious of it, and yet for the
moment it was as inaccessible as if he were once again
spending the summer at Horton Bay. The Italian command
to which Section IV was attached was apparently dug into
the mountains for an indefinite time. There was no indica-
tion that the Austrians would ever attempt to dislodge it.
Hemingway, according to Brumback, was speedily "dis-
gusted with the war." 12 He told his friend that the only
shots being fired were practice shots.

"I'm fed up," he said after a week of baseball and swim-
ming. "There's nothing here but scenery and too damn
much of that." He thought of getting out of the ambulance
corps altogether, "to see," he told Brumback, "if I can't
find out where the war is." If that failed, he hoped that he
might at least be able to get transferred to a sector on the

62 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Piave River. "They play ball down there," Hemingway
announced bitterly. While he waited for an opportunity to
get in the game which Lardner's Saturday Evening Post
busher had been calling the real worlds serious Heming-
way had to be content with unwarlike duties in the moun-
tains. Section IV was equipped largely with Fiats, and he
was detailed to an Italian ambulance. Brumback drew one
of the section's six Fords, with assignments in the flat land
below their headquarters. "I'm in the Alps," Hemingway
wrote back to Kansas City, making the best of a bad job,
"riding in a Fiat." 13

The driving itself was at first exciting and novel. For a
time he was contained by the drama of hairpin turns banked
by thousand-foot drops. The road from Schio up Monte
Pasubio to the advance line dressing posts was a well-made
one, but so narrow that the barbed wire on either side
almost touched the fenders. High- jinks on mountain roads,
like swimming in the mountain stream across the abyss from
Austrian emplacements, was a sorry substitute for guns and
action and the great crusade. Frederick Spiegel remembered
Hemingway's discontent after ten days of idle play and
commonplace duty. "He became increasingly itchy."

His ultimate solution was a blend of the two alternatives
he had discussed with Brumback. He left the ambulance
corps, though not the Red Cross, and wangled his way
further east to the more active Piave front. With several
others from Section IV he volunteered for duty with the
Red Cross Canteen. He obtained the new assignment at the
moment when the Italians were making their counter-
offensive all along the Piave, attempting to push the
Austrians back across the river. "So," Brumback wrote
later to Doctor Hemingway, "he got to see all the action
he wanted." 14 The new job was in every way a forward
area operation. The canteens were operated at seventeen
points along the front, some in the mountains, some like

ITALY 63

Hemingway's in the plains, but none of them more than
a few kilometers back of the trenches.

Each canteen included two units, a small hut which
contained both the Red Cross lieutenant's quarters and a
supply storeroom, and a larger, adjoining hut with a kitchen
and a large rest room for the Italian soldiers. The canteen
served hot coffee, chocolate, jam, and soup. The soldiers
brought their own bread. There were also rations of candy
and tobacco. The room contained writing tables, A.R.C.
postcards and letterheads, and reading material. The walls
were decorated with flags and patriotic inscriptions. The
canteen was thus a kind of soldier's club, the equivalent of
the NAAFFs and Red Cross units of World War II, avail-
able both to passing troops and to men from the command
fighting in the nearby trenches. The officers allowed their
troops to leave the trenches three or four times a week to
come back to the canteen. Hemingway took charge of such
a canteen in late June of 1918.

"The work done by these officers," reported the Depart-
ment of Military Affairs in Italy, "was of a nature which
called upon all the resources of the versatile and adaptable
American temperament." The canteens were frequently in
the range of shell fire; one American lieutenant was killed
only a few weeks before Hemingway himself was wounded.
Several of the canteens were destroyed or damaged by
Austrian fire. Hemingway, however, was no less restless
than he had been in Kansas City on the Federal Building
beat. He had not come to Italy to supervise the pouring of
hot coffee nor the distribution of patriotic literature. He
resumed his single-minded campaign for martial action.

He had made friends immediately with the Italian officers
in the trench units, and now he persuaded the local com-
mander to allow him to come up to the trenches themselves.
Every day thereafter Hemingway mounted his bicycle at
the canteen and rode to the front, "laden down," Brumback

64 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

wrote to Doctor Hemingway, "with chocolate, cigars, cig-
arets, and postcards." 15 Brumback, who pieced together the
story after Hemingway was wounded, also told his friend's
father that Ernest "thought he could do more good and be
of more service by going straight up to the trenches."
Hemingway followed this routine for six days. He had
achieved his goal; he was in the war. He became a familiar
and welcome figure; the Italian soldiers were always asking
for the giovane Americano. Hemingway threw himself into
the front-line atmosphere with the same intensity, height-
ened here by conviction and dedication, which he had
shown in high school and in Kansas City. With his gifts
for absorbing a new world he saturated himself in the
sensations of trench life. Out of those six days, and the
abbreviated seventh, supplemented by a few more weeks
with the infantry in October, Hemingway would create
during the next fifteen ye^rs not only A Farewell to Arms
but also several fine short stories.

Hemingway has always valued enormously his experience
of war. Even at eighteen he sensed instinctively its potential
utility as material and as an area for self -discipline as ob-
server and student. His behavior during this period was
neither ghoulish nor abnormally farsighted in terms of his
future vocation. It was the same instinct which impelled a
writer of another generation, in another war. "All the time
I was overseas," Norman Mailer said shortly after the pub-
lication of The Naked and the Dead in 1948, "I had con-
flicting ideas, wanting, the way everybody else did, to get
the softest job, to get by with the least pain, and also
wanting to get into combat and see it." 16 Hemingway re-
garded the opportunity in an even more intense way, since
his own temperament and the general climate of feeling
made involvement even more natural for him in Italy in
1918 than for Mailer on Luzon in 1944.

Hemingway was consciously shaping himself and his atti-

ITALY 65

tudes in 1918. "I learned about people," he said later of this
period, "under stress and before and after it." That has been
the fundamental theme, after all, of all his creative work.
Six days in the heavily engaged lines along the Piave in
July, 1918, only a few yards from the Austrian positions,
provided an excellent basic training in stress. "Also," Hem-
ingway added drily on that same occasion, "learned con-
siderable about myself." Even the letters he wrote home in
1918 showed his concentration on the reality around him
in the trenches. His language seems stilted and familiar
today, the phrases dulled by a thousand young men exposed
to later twentieth-century wars, but they must have shocked
Oak Park by their vivid enunciation of the force of his
interest in his situation.

You know they say there isn't anything funny about this
war, and there isn't. I wouldn't say that it was hell, because
that's been a bit over-worked since General Sherman's time,
but there have been about eight times when I would have
welcomed hell, just on a chance that it couldn't come up
to the phase of war I was experiencing.

For example, in the trenches, during an attack, when a
shell makes a direct hit in a group where you're standing.
Shells aren't bad except direct hits; you just take chances
on the fragments of the bursts. But when there is a direct
hit, your pals get spattered all over you; spattered is literal. 17

His removal from this scene he had struggled so long to
achieve was pathetic in its swift finality. He said later that
he was already regarded by the Italians as having a charmed
life, but at midnight on July 8, near the tiny village of
Fossalta, two weeks before his nineteenth birthday and
seven days after his first admission to the trenches, he was
struck by the exploding fragments of a trench mortar which
landed a few feet from him. He was handing out chocolate

66 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

to the Italian soldiers. According to the legend which de-
veloped in Section IV, however, testimony to his comrades'
recognition of his temperament, Hemingway was said to
have been wounded a moment after he had seized an Italian
rifle and began firing toward the Austrian lines. An instant
later, it was rumored, he saw an Italian sniper fall in No
Man's Land. As Hemingway went out to bring him in, the
shell from the mortar exploded.

Hemingway did, in reality, show considerable heroism,
but this came after he was wounded rather than before. An
Italian standing between him and the explosion was killed
instantly; a second, standing a few feet away, had both legs
blown off. A third soldier, another of those who had been
waiting for chocolate, was badly wounded. Hemingway,
having regained consciousness, "picked [him] up on his
back" and carried him to a first aid dugout. 18 The scene
was forcefully recorded, with only minor variations, in
A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway told Brumback he did
not remember how he got to the dressing station, nor that
he had carried in the soldier. An Italian officer described
the events to him the next day.

A few years later, when Hemingway's early fiction was
causing certain critics to identify him as merely a callous
recorder, Hemingway told Maxwell Perkins, his editor at
Scribner's, that he had "not been at all hardboiled since
July 8, 1918 on the night of which I discovered that that
also was vanity." 19 He developed a private ritual for both
the exorcism and utilization of his wound. One of the novels
about war which he has always admired for its authenticity
is Frederic Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune. "So
each year in July," Hemingway explained in 1942, "the
anniversary of the month when I got the big wound, I read
[it] and it all comes back again as though ... it were this
morning before daylight and you were waiting there, dry-
mouthed, for it to start." 21

ITALY 67

The fact of being wounded, and as seriously as he was,
had immense psychological implications for Hemingway;
these implications quite naturally converge on his artistic
position and work. The wound permitted him to assume
the role of semi-professional soldierhood at the very least,
with the privileges and responsibilities attending that role.
His front-line service was brief and unmartial, but the
wound qualified him as a combat man and deepened his
absorption in war as a temporary arena for the study of
men and the practice of his creative energy. Because of the
shock of the wound, and the three months of enforced
idleness, Hemingway was able to evaluate, even if only in
an elementary way, the experiences he had endured and
observed. The brevity of his service, he later concluded,
was an advantage to him as an artist. "Any experience of
war," he said in 1952, "is invaluable to a writer. But it is
destructive if he has too much."

Hemingway had enough war, in the early summer of
1918, to give him confidence in his judgments and a sound
base for the acquisition of further experience through ob-
servation. In the hospital at Milan he talked to men who
had also survived the front, and one could learn from that,
too. From a young English officer he first heard, and
adopted as "a permanent protecting talisman," 22 the lines
from Henry IV: "By my troth, I care not; a man can die
but once; we owe God a death . . . and let it go which way
it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next." Four years
later there occurred his second major lesson in war, when
he covered the Greco-Turk fighting as a correspondent.
The profit he drew from the Near East campaigns was
made possible because of his initiation in Italy. He was able
to learn quickly and accurately in Thrace and Macedonia
because he had been blooded at Fossalta. It is on this basis
that World War I must be included in his literary appren-
ticeship. Hemingway summed it up many years later.

68 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion
of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then
when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that
illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being
severely wounded ... I had a bad time until I figured it
out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened
to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always
done. 23

He paid a heavy price, as he has all his life in every area
of experience, for his knowledge and insight. He received
two hundred and twenty-seven separate wounds from the
mortar and was hit simultaneously in the leg by a machine
gun round. "My feet,'* he wrote his family from Milan,
"felt like I had rubber boots full of water on (hot water),
and my knee cap was acting queer. The machine gun bullet
just felt like a sharp smack on the leg with an icy snow
ball." 24 After he regained consciousness the second time he
was carried three kilometers by stretcher. The road was
being shelled, and the bearers as, again, in A Farewell to
Arms dropped him frequently. The dressing station had
been evacuated during the attack; he lay for two hours in
a stable waiting for an ambulance. An Italian ambulance
ultimately moved him to another dressing station. "I had
a lot of pals among the medical officers," he told his family.
Twenty-eight shell fragments were then removed from his
legs. He drew pictures, in his letter home, to indicate to
his family the size of the fragments.

Hemingway spent five days in a field hospital before he
was fit to be moved to the base hospital in Milan. He had
another operation there, and another, and then another; he
had a dozen operations in all. His right leg was in a plaster
splint for some weeks. "I wouldn't really be comfortable
now," he wrote after six weeks in the hospital, "unless I
had some pain." 25 His closing sentences were boyishly

ITALY 69

ironic. "As Ma Pettingill says, 'Leave us keep the home
fires burning/ " Brumback visited him several times, and
reported to Doctor Hemingway that his son had stated
with conviction that he now intended to stick to ambulance
work. These were merely the thoughtful words of a good
son. A few weeks after his convalescent leave ended in the
early fall, Hemingway managed to get himself assigned
to the Italian infantry. He served with them during October
and until the Armistice in November. Thus, when the war
ended, he was a bona fide fighting man. He was recom-
mended for and received the silver medal of valor for his
conduct at Fossalta, and because he earned the medal the
hard way he has always had a combat soldier's sensitivity
to both the significance and limitations of ribbons.

Hemingway was discharged by the Red Cross on Janu-
ary 4, 1919. A few days later he sailed for New York on
the steamship Giuseppe Verdi. He had acquired, in addition
to the immeasurable extension of his education, a personality
and a role. He had been a foot soldier, the elite of fighting
men. "That's one good thing about being an infantryman,"
he wrote in 1950 in Across the River and Into the Trees.
"You never have any dreams except bad dreams." He would
forever hold a blunt contempt for what he once called "the
military politicians of the rear." His judgments about men
at war, because of the nature of this first Italian chapter,
would always be deeply felt and very accurate. The lugu-
brious phrase of the period, "the baptism of fire," could be
applied to him quite literally and with dignity. He had yet
to discover, with veterans of every war, that one did not
shed it when he picked up his discharge papers.

V.

Hemingway landed in New York on January 21, 1919.
He immediately received at the age of nineteen the first of

70 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

many attentions from the press. The New York Sun carried
a five hundred word story on page eight about his war
record and wounds. He was described as the first wounded
American to arrive home from the Italian front, "with
probably more scars than any other man, in or out of uni-
form, who defied the shrapnel of the Central Powers."
Manhattan had not yet become bored with its returning
heroes; Hemingway's personality, as well as the fact that
he had been "before the war a reporter for the Kansas City
Star" made the Sun's reporter doubly responsive. Heming-
way was also an excellent subject; the vividness of the
story's phrases about his wounds clearly came from him.
As for his future plans, Hemingway was thinking exclu-
sively in terms of writing. He thought he was "qualified
to take a job on any New York newspaper that wants a
man that is not afraid of work and wounds." The interview
was an indication of the sort of thing one of his friends
referred to when he said later that Hemingway "tasted
blood early" as far as notoriety was concerned, and that,
leaving aside his gifts and natural capacity for success, he
could scarcely have been expected to settle down to a con-
ventional, Oak Park life.

Hemingway, however, did go home to Oak Park briefly.
His effect on the community, and on his own generation
in particular, was spectacular. "I remember him distinctly,"
a contemporary recalled in 1940, "walking up the street in
his blue uniform, and limping, with a cane." 26 He was
invited to speak at the high school. In the assembly hall he
discussed his experiences and, one of his audience later re-
ported, "held up a pair of shrapnel-riddled trousers for the
students to see." He told them that it was the first speech
he had ever made, and that he intended it to be his last, but
he discussed the war in lucid terms; one of the listeners
maintained years later that "the repercussions in Oak Park
to that speech are still remembered." The garments worn

ITALY 71

on the night of July 8th, however, were his principal props.
Frank Platt, the head of the English Department and faculty
sponsor of the Burke Club, as he had been during Heming-
way's student days, brought his former pupil to a meeting
of the club. Hemingway displayed his khaki jacket, pants,
and shoes to the boys, enumerating his wounds, according
to Platt, and allowing them to examine the holes for proof.
"Hemingway limped a little," Platt recalled, "but he had
escaped death."

There were several things, on the other hand, which
modified the pleasant triumph. There was another opera-
tion on his leg, and there was the familiar disenchantment
with suburbia. There was no G.I. Bill through which one
could solve or delay the situation by going to college, even
had he wanted, and he had not been able to save any money
from the scanty Red Cross allowance. The anticlimax was
obviously substantial. He did a good deal of restless walk-
ing around the village, and he developed a cynical manner
toward the girls whom he occasionally took out. He told
an older friend one day that he was deeply in love. "A great
temporary happiness," Hemingway explained, "has over-
come me." There were stories about his presence in the
Italian saloons of Chicago, and vague gossip about a party
he went to with some ensigns from the Great Lakes Naval
Station. Krebs, the central figure of the short story Hem-
ingway wrote in 1924 about a veteran's homecoming, "tried
... to keep his life from being complicated" by family pres-
sures and obligations. Finally Krebs decided to go away
altogether. "Still," he reflects, assessing his gains and losses,
"none of it had touched him. He had felt sorry for his
mother and she had made him lie. He would go to Kansas
City and get a job and she would feel all right about it." 27

Hemingway himself made a different, less abrupt adjust-
ment to his rehabilitation, and one that was thoroughly
appropriate to his personal interests and his intense desire

72 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

to learn to write. He went up to northern Michigan and
stayed there a long time, fishing, writing, reading. He came
back to Chicago several times, and in the summer of 1919
he located Ted Brumback, who was working there on the
old Journal. "He looked the same," said Brumback, who
had last seen him in the Milan hospital a year before, "but
he limped." 28 Hemingway persuaded Brumback to come up
to Michigan. At night, as they sat around the campfire after
a trout dinner, Hemingway outlined his plans. He intended
to get a job on a newspaper and write in his spare time. As
soon as he could make a living from his fiction, he would
devote all his time to it. He was buoyant and confident with
Brumback, telling his friend that he expected to be able to
support himself as a fiction writer after "a short time."

Carl Edgar had also gotten home in 1919, and he visited
Hemingway for a few days in Oak Park. Later, during the
summer, Edgar saw a good deal of him at Horton Bay.
Edgar was much impressed by the impact the war had so
evidently made on Hemingway. "He came back," Edgar
once said, "figuratively as well as literally shot to pieces."
Edgar concluded that the intensity of Hemingway's desire
to write was directly connected with the war. "He seemed
to have a tremendous need to express the things that he had
felt and seen."

Hemingway worked hard in Michigan and stayed on
after his own family and the rest of the summer colony had
gone home. "I put in a fall and half [a] winter writing up
in Petoskey, Michigan," Hemingway said many years later,
describing the extent of the preparation which preceded
his first expatriate publication in 1923. It was a period of
discouraging rejection. "I worked and wrote," he said on
another occasion, "and couldn't sell anything." The chron-
ology of rejection which, except for his journalism, would
continue until 1922 had begun, actually, during the war.
From Milan Hemingway had mailed to a friend in Chicago

ITALY 73

a number of stories which she tried unsuccessfully to sell
for him in the United States.

In retrospect, however, the period he spent in northern
Michigan in 1919 was of great profit. The area as a whole,
as well as its associations and implications, gave Heming-
way the material for a large part of his earliest published
fiction. One of his first stories, "Up in Michigan," was
drawn from it. 29 Of the fifteen stories in In Our Time, the
collection which in 1925 brought him his first important
critical recognition, seven stemmed directly from the penin-
sula country he had fished and hunted since boyhood. The
solitary weeks he spent there in 1919, coming as they did
as an aftermath to his Italian experiences, allowed him a
rich perspective. A number of his wartime friends came up
to Michigan with him for short vacations that year, includ-
ing Bill Home and several others from the ambulance corps.
"Hemingway, to my own certain knowledge," Home said
many years later, "never threw off his experiences in the
war." The force of those experiences, and the fact that he
had this northern Michigan interval in which to assess them,
made possible the kind of strong, dimensional treatment he
gave to Horton Bay in the early 1920's.

CHAPTER
IV

TORONTO

"The Toronto Star laid great emphasis
on human interest." J. H. CRANSTON*

Horton Bay, to which Hemingway owed so much in the
formation of his interests and attitudes, also provided him
with the next opportunity in his literary apprenticeship. It
was through a summer friendship in the northern Michigan
colony that he received his introducnon to the Toronto
Star.

The late Ralph Connable, for many years head of the
F. W. Woolworth chain in Canada, with headquarters in
Toronto, had a summer home in Petoskey, Michigan. He
had come originally from Chicago, and was an old friend
of the Hemingway family. He was particularly fond of
Doctor Hemingway's oldest boy, who called him Uncle
Ralph. When the young veteran was at loose ends after
the war, spending a restless summer in Michigan in 1919,
Connable suggested that he come up to Canada. He could
live at the Connable home in Toronto, acting as a kind of
tutor to their young son. This would give him plenty of
time for his writing, or, if he preferred, Connable was sure
he could be of help in terms of a local newspaper job.

Such generosity was characteristic of Connable, a cheer-
ful, gregarious man who had overcome the Canadian an-
tagonism toward Americans. Connable was a particular

TORONTO 75

favorite because of his legendary sense of humor; an obitu-
ary referred to him as "one of the city's best known practical
jokers." The Toronto Daily Star devoted most of its full-
column notice of his death in 1939 to a chronicle of his
most celebrated jests. He was a man of frank, open kind-
ness, shrewd and friendly, and with the sort of tolerant
understanding that was required by a restless, rather bitter
young man. The whole sequence of events, both in its per-
sonal as well as its vocational aspects, was as fortunate as
that which had led Hemingway to Kansas City in 1917.

His informal duties in the Connable household in the
late fall of 1919 occupied only a part of his time and energy.
Connable turned him over to one of his own friends, Arthur
Donaldson, head of the Toronto Star's local display adver-
tising. Donaldson, in turn, took Hemingway down the hall
to the office of Gregory Clark, at that time feature editor
of the Star Weekly. 2 Another chapter in Hemingway's ap-
prenticeship had begun. He would be associated with the
Star Weekly as well as its parent paper, the Daily Star
for virtually the whole of the next four years. The Toronto
Star Limited, the organization within which the two papers
operated, was as appropriately suitable to Hemingway's
training requirements at this stage as the Kansas City Star
had been ideal as a preliminary school. The American and
Canadian papers, indeed, were of such diverse natures that
had his relationship with them been reversed had he gone
to Toronto in 1917 and to Kansas City in 1920 the entire
pattern of his apprenticeship would have been seriously
altered and damaged.

In Kansas City Hemingway had worked under conscien-
tious editors who took with the greatest seriousness their
responsibilities to the profession in general and to

76 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

reporters in particular. Through Pete Wellington, and
through the entire company and atmosphere of the Kansas
City Star, Hemingway had been indoctrinated in the neces-
sities of accuracy, in the obligations of vigorous prose, and
in the requirements of forceful narrative. It had been a
school with high, harsh standards, rigidly enforced. Few
such standards existed on either of the Toronto papers
owned by the late Joseph E. Atkinson.

Atkinson's weekend publication, the Star Weekly, was
in particular dedicated largely to the indiscriminate enter-
tainment of its subscribers. It was published on Saturday,
because of legal prohibitions against printing and selling a
paper on the Sabbath. It included a news section that was
necessarily sketchy, and a conventional front page cover-
age of local, national, and international events, but its
primary function was as a weekly magazine which Atkin-
son hoped ultimately to distribute throughout Canada.

The Star Weekly was the first Canadian paper to use
American color comics. It exploited in full the reader values
of an excellent illustrated section. It had several cartoonists,
notably the late Jimmy Frise, who were as good as their
metropolitan New York colleagues. More important, from
Hemingway's point of view, the Star Weekly emphasized
feature material on a virtually limitless range of topics
Atkinson placed certain flexible boundaries on sex and
blasphemy and bought most of its material, in 1920, from
free-lance writers. The magazine also possessed an editor
who, though he contributed nothing directly to Heming-
way's training, was sympathetic and generous to young
men of the American's talent and temperament.

The late J. Herbert Cranston, editor of the Star Weekly
in 1920 its editor, in fact, from 1911 until 1932 was a
man of considerably more literary interests and judgment
than his employer. Cranston's personality and values, plus
his pressing need for inexpensive writers, made the Star

TORONTO 77

Weekly a natural progression in Hemingway's apprentice-
ship. All Hemingway's gifts for narrative and for ironic
impressionism were encouraged in such surroundings and
under such an editor. Cranston, like the harassed editors of
all such publications, guided his staff as best he could be-
tween the requirements of a semi-literate audience and the
decencies of responsible writing. No one understood better
than he the nature of the medium.

"The Star" Cranston said many years later, just before
his death in 1952, and long after he had been forced out of
the editorship to make room for Hearst-like techniques he
could not stomach, "laid great emphasis on human interest.
It knew that the masses derived much more entertainment
from reading of the doings and foibles of ordinary indi-
viduals like themselves than of those in the seats of the
mighty."

Cranston was a mild, pious man. Reserved and serious,
he was deeply committed to the personal conviction that
through the Star Weekly he could do more than merely
conspire in the creation of an enormous circulation. He
hoped that in the magazine he could establish a worthy
vehicle for young Canadian writers. There has been a very
real hostility toward both the Star Weekly and the Daily
Star, coming from some of those who have worked for the
papers and from thoughtful Canadians who mistrust the
papers' ethics. Cranston himself, both as an individual and
as an editor, never inspired anything but good will and
respect. "He was a lovable editor and loyal friend," accord-
ing to one of his former contributors, "who was never
equipped to oppose the utter ruthlessness of the men who
successfully developed the Star's circulation."

Cranston had none of the ascetic leadership of Pete
Wellington. He prided himself on the temperate quality of
his editorship. "I could not drive," he said later, analyzing
the differences between his own editorial techniques and

78 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

those of the men who were closer to the owner. He was
content to function as editor in an old world, modest sense
of the role, preferring even to buy his material through
correspondence rather than personal contact. Cranston had,
nevertheless, a realistic sense of the tone and treatment
which were required for large circulation material. For a
young writer like Hemingway, who had already learned
the fundamentals of his trade, but needed the opportunity
to exercise them, he could be of value simply by his recog-
nition of work that would interest a broad audience.

"The Star" Cranston declared in 1951, "aimed to give
the people largely what they wanted to read rather than
what they ought to read if they would become intelligent
citizens." As a contributor to the Star Weekly, Hemingway
was encouraged to nourish and enlarge his instinct for inter-
esting material. His editor emphasized an ancient principle
in the pursuit of their audience. "We always sought to get
an article started with a striking anecdote," Cranston once
explained, "which would whet the appetite of the reader
for more. The bait offered in the first few paragraphs must
be such as would securely hook the fish." Such principles
were always conditioned by Cranston's deeply cherished
hope that he could establish the Star Weekly as a magazine
of genuine literary stature.

It was not an easy objective, either in the light of his
audience or of his employer's goal of dominating Canadian
journalism. Cranston quite naturally fought a losing battle.
His twenty-one-year tenure, however, was not a steady
chronicle of defeat. If his editorship were graphed in points
of partial success and total failure, in his attempt to realize
this private ambition, the chart would show that Heming-
way began to write for the Star Weekly at about the mo-
ment of maximum fruition in Cranston's ideal. Between
1920 and 1927 Cranston enjoyed his greatest freedom from

TORONTO 79

owner and executive supervision, and with it the greatest
success in the development of talented young writers.

Immediately after the war, in Cranston's own memory of
the period, he "gradually built up a fine array of staff
writers, and added one or two outstanding staff artists."
Shortly after Hemingway arrived in Toronto, Cranston
probably under pressure from above also began to alter
the editorial point of view. "We now sought," he recalled,
"to give a larger number of entertainment features, and
possibly fewer information articles. By that I mean humor-
ous articles, Leacock, Lardner, and many others, some of
them American syndicate, and encouraging humor wher-
ever we could find it in Canada." The division between the
Daily Star and the Star Weekly, above all, was well de-
fined at this time. "The two papers," Cranston remembered
nostalgically, "were almost two completely separate entities
in the early days."

Hemingway thus became a contributor at the instant
when the increasing circulation made Cranston's appetite
for young writers a sharp one, and when the new emphasis
on humor and entertainment was still balanced in part by
the earlier requirement of more serious treatment. There
was a small literary renaissance in Toronto in the 1920's,
and although the Star Weekly played no formal part in
the movement it would be ludicrous to imagine it as an
agent of revolt or innovation many of its writers partici-
pated actively in the attempt to vitalize Canadian literature.
Their more serious work was often made possible by
Cranston's ready purchase of their journalism. This was
Cranston's greatest contribution to Canadian letters, and
the closest he came to the realization of his private ambi-
tions for the Star Weekly.

One of the men Cranston helped remembered him in
terms which clarify the nature of the editor's role in Hem-
ingway's apprenticeship. "Looking back," said Merrill Deni-

80 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

son, today a writer in the field of industrial history, "I now
realize that he must have picked men for both their writing
skills and mental outlooks, and having accepted them, let
the men themselves proceed pretty much on their own."
Cranston, according to another writer who worked with
him, was "shy and retiring, wrote little himself, but spent
his energies discovering and encouraging talent wherever
he found it." Hemingway reached Toronto in the first
weeks of 1920 in need of both encouragement and discov-
ery. Cranston remained his friend and supporter during the
whole of the young American's turbulent association with
the Star. He never made any attempt to identify himself
with Hemingway's subsequent successes, beyond a brief
note in his Canadian Who's Who biography in which he
listed Hemingway among a half dozen others to whom he
"gave first publication." The legend developed within a
younger generation of Canadian writers that Cranston was
the man who discovered Hemingway. Cranston himself was
always frank to admit that he never looked upon the
American "as likely to develop into anything out of the
ordinary."

Cranston's bequest was his immediate recognition of such
gifts as Hemingway had at the time, and his bestowal of
the opportunity to exercise and extend them. Newspaper
men of the period invariably testify to Cranston's consistent
good taste as an editor. He was, according to Tim Reid, a
prominent Canadian publicist and former city editor of the
Daily Star, "an excellent judge of a story." Cranston en-
couraged Hemingway from the beginning by his willing-
ness to buy whatever the latter submitted. At their first
meeting they "chatted about the kind of thing the paper
wanted," Cranston recalled; after that "the ice was broken
and for a number of weeks Hemingway's name appeared
regularly in the paper." Cranston characterized the young
man's work as written in conventional newspaper style,

TORONTO 81

with considerable wit. This was the quality, in fact, which
most pleased the editor. "Hemingway," Cranston declared
in 1952, "could write in good, plain Anglo-Saxon, and had
a certain much prized gift of humor."

It was as a humorist, therefore, that Hemingway pre-
sented himself in much of his Star Weekly material in 1920.
Humor continued to be at least an important ingredient in
all of his work for the magazine and, to a lesser degree, the
Daily Star, during the next four years. His style and atti-
tudes matured as he ranged experimentally through the
various levels of burlesque, mimicry, satire, and irony. All
of these qualities have been important in his fiction; his debt
to Cranston and the Toronto papers was thus a large one
in those terms alone.

Hemingway's first story for the Toronto Star Weekly,
published on February 14, 1920, without a by-line, estab-
lished immediately this satiric impulse. 3 It was one of his
few unsigned articles for either the Daily or the Weekly
until late in 1923, when, though an experienced and well-
paid reporter, he was being disciplined by the assistant
managing editor. In February, 1920, however, the Star
Weekly quite naturally printed without a by-line a story
which was only a little over five hundred words long.

Hemingway made the most of the situation's potential.
His ironic account of the snobberies of a Toronto scheme
for renting works of art must have pleased Cranston, always
searching as he was for wit that was neither too subtle nor
too broad. Hemingway's treatment, in which he isolated
and emphasized nuances of speech and affectation, was cal-
culated to mock the world he was describing a world not
unlike Oak Park and entertain the less genteel subscribers
for whom he was writing. It was deft and promising, evi-

82 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

dence of high spirits and precocious gifts of mimicry as
much as of any genuine talent. Certainly, however, it was
verification that he could establish himself as a free lance
with this weekly magazine whose needs were so neatly
tailored to his current assets and requirements. No one but
a clairvoyant could have foretold from the article that he
would ever write any notable fiction; nor, on the other
hand, was there anything in it so clumsy or dull that such
a prophecy could be outlawed. It was an encouraging start;
it gave him a toehold in journalism and all the benefits of
regular deadlines.

Three weeks later Cranston bought and printed another
Hemingway story, this one equally shaped from and for
the humorous prerequisites. 4 Cranston also gave him his first
Toronto by-line. The lead paragraphs displayed the readi-
ness, basic to the later success of his fiction, with which
Hemingway has always been able to grasp and quickly
identify himself with whatever world he happens at the
moment to be inhabiting. Canada in 1920 was experiencing
a mild nationalism, expressed in a struggle with England
for political release, in the literary renaissance to which
Cranston contributed the Star Weekly's money, and in a
spasm of anti- Americanism. A Toronto audience, in Crans-
ton's principle, would inevitably rise to the bait of Heming-
way's opening lines.

The land of the free and the home of the brave is the
modest phrase used by certain citizens of the republic to
the south of us to designate the country they live in. They
may be brave but there is nothing free. Free lunch passed
some time ago and on attempting to join the Free Masons
you are informed that it will cost you seventy-five dollars.

His second paragraph linked this crisp but seemingly
unproductive lead with his general topic. "The true home

TORONTO 83

of the free and the brave," Hemingway wrote, "is the
barber college. Everything is free there. And you have to
be brave." His prose had the exaggerated hyperbole basic
to this type of humor. "For a visit to the barber college
requires the cold, naked valor of the man who walks clear-
eyed to death." The scene established, Hemingway picked
up the narrative, shifting to dialogue that was easy and
colloquial. He milked the situation with the expertness of
a vaudeville routine. The story was semi-professional; its
tricks and effects indicated his growing facility and confi-
dence. He was maintaining in his writing an intensely per-
sonal flavor. It was clear that if he did not remain a hack
too long he had enough individuality to escape the formula
prisons of feature writing.

This was made abundantly evident by his third story,
which was published the next week and preserved the ironic
direction of his work. 5 His article on "How To Be Popular
in Peace Though a Slacker in War" was savage and per-
sonal. Its satire was observant, keyed again to an audience
whose casualties in World War I had been appalling;
Toronto's pride in its war record was belligerent and anti-
American. Hemingway's lead exploited a characteristic
blend of mock rhetoric and abrupt colloquialism.

During the late friction with Germany a certain number
of Torontonians of military age showed their desire to
assist in the conduct of the war by emigrating to the States
to give their all ... in munition plants. Having amassed
large quantities of sheckles through their patriotic labor
they now desire to return to Canada and gain fifteen per
cent, on their United States money.

Employing derisively the stock phrases ordinarily used to
justify draft-dodging, Hemingway declared that "through
a desire to aid these morally courageous souls who supplied

84 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

the sinews of war," he would offer a few hints for "the
returning munitioneer" who wanted to be popular. He
suggested that it would be wise to come back to a different
town, and he also had advice on how to handle the prob-
lem of a discharge button. He gave explicit instruction, still
in the parody of a technical or academic manual, on the
matter of dress. "Go to one of the stores handling second-
hand army goods and purchase yourself a trench coat. If
you cannot get a trench coat buy a pair of army shoes."

The war, quite clearly, was a genuinely compulsive fac-
tor in all Hemingway's attitudes in 1920. His instinct to-
ward satire had been sharpened by his experiences in Italy
and by the disillusioning contradictions he observed in
Chicago and Toronto. Had his reaction to the war been
less positive he would have used it a great deal more in his
work for the Star Weekly. Gregory Clark, the Weekly's
feature editor and principal staff writer, who became a
close friend of Hemingway during this period, observed
this aspect of the young American with great interest. He
felt that Hemingway was enduring a chaotic interlude of
adjustment. "He was lost," Clark said many years later,
"in the lovely confusion of trying to understand his past.
He was trying to orient himself to the experiences he had
been having."

Clark was equally struck by Hemingway's gifts as a
writer. "His use of words," Clark said in 1952, "was pre-
cise, aware. His diction his choice of words, I mean
was extraordinary." He remembered as a disturbing man-
nerism the way in which Hemingway was continually
shadow-boxing, either during a conversation or while others
were talking; Clark felt it indicated a basic lack of confi-
dence. Hemingway, however, soon adjusted to his new
friends. Before long, according to Cranston, he had "tall
tales to tell of his war experiences." The fourth of Heming-
way 's 1920 pieces of satire, in fact, was another version of

TORONTO 85

wartime slackers, less bitter than the one about Canadian
munitioneers, but no less denunciatory in its mockery, this
time, of service men who had not been in combat. 6 It was
particularly significant as an indication of Hemingway's
instinct for the general pattern of fiction. Save for the first
paragraph, the article was composed almost entirely of
dialogue between two Canadian veterans. Even that single
paragraph of exposition was itself a conventional opening
for pulp fiction. "Two returned men," Hemingway began,
"stood gazing up in infinite disgust at a gang of workmen
tearing down a building on King Street."

In the remaining twelve paragraphs of dialogue Heming-
way established the two men as legitimate combat veterans,
supplying a refrain of wit in the resistance each old soldier
showed toward hearing the other's reminiscence. The
speech as a whole, to be sure, had the synthetic, stock real-
ism of readable magazine fiction of the period, but the
authenticity of some of the idiom and language rhythms
was unmistakable. It was the speech of Canadians of the
working class, still retaining some of the old country in-
flections. It could never have been confused with the words
of a veteran of the A.E.F., nor was it altogether like the
talk of an English Tommy. It was an elementary distinc-
tion, perhaps, but a conscious distinction nonetheless, and
one not always made by newspapermen older and more
experienced than Hemingway.

Hemingway's affinity for dialogue, and his concern with
its accurate use, was plainly evident in his work during the
spring of 1920. He tended particularly to rely on it in
these satiric articles. On March 1 3 the Star Weekly printed
Hemingway's acid portrait of the mayor of Toronto. 7 The
seven-hundred-word character sketch was an extended dis-
play of the gift for caricature which Hemingway had
demonstrated in the story on renting works of art. The
article had an uncompromising frankness that was fresh

86 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

and startling. Its lucidity verifies Hemingway's memory of
the solitary work he had done in Michigan between his
return from Italy in 1919 and his arrival in Toronto in
early 1920. When Gregory Clark summed up his specific
memories of Hemingway's Toronto journalism, this par-
ticular sketch was the only one which still remained clear
in his mind. "It was good," Clark recalled in 1950. "Maybe
we didn't know how good."

Mayor Tommy Church was presented by Hemingway
as he appeared during an evening at the fights in Massey
Hall. T. L. Church advertised himself widely, and was
generally accepted as, a zealous devotee of all sports. The
synthetic pretense by a vote-conscious politician enraged
Hemingway. He built the portrait around this aspect of
the Mayor's personality.

Mayor Church is a keen lover of all sporting contests. He
is an enthusiast over boxing, hockey and all the manly
sports. Any sporting event that attracts voters as spectators
numbers his Worship as one of its patrons. If marbles, leap
frog, and tit-tat-toe were viewed by citizens of voting age,
the Mayor would be enthusiastically present. Due to the
youth of the competitors the Mayor reluctantly refrains
from attending all of the above sports.

Hemingway maintained that after the last bout that night
Mayor Church said, "Meeting's dismissed," thinking he was
at the City Council. The final paragraph reaffirmed the lead.
"The Mayor," Hemingway wrote, "is just as interested in
hockey as he is in boxing. If cootie fighting or Swedish
pinochle, or Australian boomerang hurling are ever taken
up by the voters, count on the Mayor to be there in a
ringside seat. For the Mayor loves all sport." It was one of
the stories which Cranston, like Clark, could remember
years later. He recalled it as "a lively description of Mayor

TORONTO 87

Tommy Church," written "in characteristic Hemingway
style with plenty of punch in it."

Hemingway's punch was not restricted in his 1920 jour-
nalism to the thoroughly humorous or satiric. There was
another block of material substantial enough to illustrate,
like the satires, other characteristics of this stage of his
apprenticeship. Hemingway wrote for the Star Weekly
five stories about fishing and camping. They were long and
detailed. In wordage they exceeded the satiric group; they
were also less impressive as prose. Perhaps Hemingway was
too familiar with the material to erect with care the neat
structures and developments of several of his satires. The
treatment was loose and patronizing. Stylistically, with oc-
casional exceptions, the stories tended to look back toward
the high school Trapeze rather than forward to the early
fiction. They were virtually essays, clear and interesting,
but without the sense of form which characterized his
portraits and denunciations. His manner was stern and
didactic.

"Sporting magazines," he began a story printed on April
24, "have fostered a popular fiction to the effect that no
gentleman would catch a trout in any manner but on a fly
on a nine foot tapered leader attached to a double tapered
fly line cast from a forty-five dollar four and a half ounce
rod." 8 The instructional impulse, basic to all successful
journalism, was a strong one in Hemingway. He explained
the motivation behind this deceit. "Out door magazines,"
he pointed out, "are supported by their advertising." He
maintained that the advertisers were manufacturing expen-
sive products "suitable to the understocked, over-fished
streams of the Eastern United States." Myth and fraud
clarified, Hemingway concentrated on the various kinds
of live bait. The remainder of the article almost a thou-
sand words was an elaboration of his belief that "worms,

88 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

grubs, beetles, crickets, and grasshoppers are some of the
best trout baits." 9

The articles about fishing and camping indicated Hem-
ingway's concern with expository writing. Cranston bought
three more for June and August issues. They preserved the
subjective intimacy of most of Hemingway's journalism.
He was already following wherever possible the funda-
mental edict of his creative writing; a man should write
only about what he has known. The first two stories were
timely lectures on how to spend a vacation in the woods. 10
The third, its emphasis on the more profitable drama of
rainbow trout, was much the best of the trio, less coy and
labored. 11 Hemingway found a Canadian angle for this
account of fishing experiences that had been primarily in
Michigan. "The rainbow," he wrote, "has recently been
introduced into Canadian waters. At present the best rain-
bow trout fishing in the world is in the rapids of the
Canadian Soo." The inflated rhetoric of high school prose
still clung to his writing. "It is a wild and nerve-frazzling
sport," he went on, "and the odds are in favor of the big
trout who tear off thirty or forty yards of line at a rush
and then will sulk at the base of a big rock and refuse to be
stirred into action by the pumping of a stout fly aided by a
fluent monologue of Ojibwayan profanity." His precise
sense of landscape, as he catalogued the physical character-
istics of the trout river, was sharper and more mature.

A high pine covered bluff that rises steep up out of
the shadows. A short sand slope down to the river and a
quick elbow turn with a little flood wood jammed in the
bend and then a pool.

A pool where the moselle colored water sweeps into a
dark swirl and expanse that is blue-brown with depth and
fifty feet across.

TORONTO 89

There was the recurrent suggestion of his instinct for
fiction as he pointed out that "the action is supplied by two
figures that slog into the picture up along the trail along the
river bank with loads on their back that would tire a pack
horse." He remained in the present tense, dramatizing the
fishermen and their excitement. His narrative of the catch
itself was energetic and declarative, cleansed for the mo-
ment of garrulous journalese. "He tore down the pool and
the line went out until the core of the reel showed. He
jumped and each time he shot into the air we lowered the
tip and prayed. Finally he jumped, and the line went slack
and Jacques reeled in. We thought he was gone and then
he jumped right under our faces."

Hemingway provided a kind of final installment to this
fishing and camping series with an account of lake trout
he had encountered in Michigan in September of that
year. 12 The story was not written, however, until after he
returned from Horton Bay it was published in the Star
Weekly on November 20 and he justified its out-of-
season quality with an entertaining lead in which he de-
scribed the "opening of the great indoor fishing season."
His paragraphs were slanted expertly with local allusions.
"More fish are caught in clubs at this time of year," Hem-
ingway wrote, "than ever were taken from the Nipigon.
Bigger trout are taken around the tables in King Street
cafeterias than in the prizes offered by the sporting maga-
zines. And more fish get away within the confines of To-
ronto than are lost in all the trout streams of Christendom."

In this way, with winter anecdotes about the great
catches of spring and summer, Hemingway completed his
essays on northern Michigan. They had as much body as
most of the journalism Cranston was able to buy for the
Star Weekly; they had more durability than some of it.
They contained occasional paragraphs of vigor and imag-
ination. They were competent and effective in terms of the

90 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

medium for which they were designed; it would be un-
realistic to belittle the expository and narrative gifts they
represented in a twenty-year-old high school graduate. It
would be equally unrealistic to aggrandize them. The ar-
ticles emphasize again the crucial importance of experi-
ences and associations which would occur during the next
three years. In 1920 Hemingway was neither more nor less
promising than any talented undergraduate of wit and
energy. On the other hand, he was exposed to dangers that
do not normally exist for a young writer in undergraduate
circles. An extreme vocational adaptability was already ap-
parent in his free-lance work. It was evident in the casual-
ness with which he had warmed over some of the camping
material for a second Star Weekly serving.

IV.

On April 10, in the same issue in which was printed the
satiric exercise in dialogue about the two Canadian veterans,
there appeared a second story by Hemingway. 13 It was
longer than its companion, and so different as to seem the
work of another writer. It represented a kind of journalism
Hemingway produced for the Star Weekly with increasing
frequency; it was almost a scenario of his work during the
fall of 1923. At this stage in his career, however, its glib
facility was alarming. The 1920 treatment displayed a
journeyman capacity for manufacturing a salable story
from wholly stale material. Hemingway wrote about teeth,
the causes and manner of their infection, and the merits and
disadvantages in having them extracted.

The story was as shrewdly presented as a patent medi-
cine, slick with heavy wit, and admirably lucid. No amount
of clarity, however, could disguise its pedestrian quality.
Hemingway quoted at length, like the weariest of hacks,
from "a leading Toronto dentist." His nine final paragraphs

TORONTO 91

about six hundred words were an unacknowledged
popularization of the charts and texts which hang in a
dentist's office. Hemingway had an immense capacity for
hard work, and an impressive willingness to learn; his talent
nevertheless required severe tutoring if it weren't to de-
generate into mere fluency.

That the article was more than a momentary cynicism
was verified by a story published two weeks later. 14 Hem-
ingway here produced what was little more than an
anecdote. Less than five hundred words, its only resem-
blance to his conscientious satires was that once again he
exposed a popular illusion. His theme was that "big depart-
ment stores cannot obtain insurance against changes of
style." He explained that a corollary of this was the tech-
nique by which unsold clothes were being sent by the
Toronto stores to small cities "in the mining district, bush
or country," where they were re-offered for sale as the
latest Toronto models. The article was spun from the
rhetorical question, "What becomes of the old style, and
the unsuccessful styles?" Hemingway enlarged on the com-
mercial hoax, and ended with a single sentence paragraph
whose crisp paradox may have been the material's original
attraction. "These little stores on the edge of things are the
real graveyard of dead styles."

The story was at best an abortive execution of a com-
monplace conceit. Like the rest of his work in 1920, how-
ever, it convinced Cranston that in Hemingway he had
located a writer of uncommon inventiveness. Verbally as
well as in prose, Hemingway evidently overwhelmed the
editor. "He had been a vagabond," Cranston once ex-
plained, on the basis of what Hemingway told him in
Toronto, "from the day he decided he had had enough of
school." Cranston enlarged on this on another occasion,
describing Hemingway's boyhood as having been spent
"riding the rods and sleeping in tramp jungles." Heming-

92 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

way was taking over as his own all the hobo lore he had
heard from Lionel Moise in Kansas City. 15 Canadians, until
very recently at least, have been willing to believe almost
anything of Americans. Hemingway found Cranston an
excellent audience.

"There was nothing Hemingway would not do just for
the sheer excitement of it," Cranston maintained, "and he
had eaten or said he had all kinds of things, slugs, earth-
worms, lizards, all the delicacies that the savage tribes of the
world fancy, just to get their taste." The editor recalled
that whenever he "ran out of subjects on which Heming-
way might write he was always able to pull a good one out
of his adventurous past." The fourth story Hemingway
sold Cranston was an illustration, for the Canadian, of this
limitless reservoir. Hemingway had known and observed
petty criminals in Kansas City, and he had cultivated the
friendship of cops and detectives. He now wrote for the
Star Weekly a plausible analysis of department store lar-
ceny. 10 The triviality of the material did not prevent it
from being excellent practice up to a point for a young
writer who wanted to be able to explain and clarify and
vivify. The treatment was standard Sunday supplement
presentation, of the sort that was being supplied regularly
to similar mass circulation weeklies and syndicates in the
United States. Such articles consolidated his association
with the Star Weekly. "I would hesitate to suggest that I
taught Hemingway anything," Cranston said later. "He
was a born storyteller."

In 1920 the importance of newspaper work to Heming-
way derived primarily from the opportunity to write con-
stantly, for publication, in a medium which required narra-
tive that was interesting and forceful. By 1923, when Hem-
ingway completed four concentrated years of feature
writing and reporting, his compulsion toward fiction was
breaking through the restrictions of the Star Weekly

frrmnli ("Vrt-nin final orl-irl^c in i-np> lit-* foil n( 1 O') 3 \iTf>re*

TORONTO 93

transition pieces between the feature and the short story.
Even in 1920 Hemingway's instinct toward exposition
through dialogue and action was a powerful one. For the
issue of June 5 Hemingway wrote a full-column survey of
the role which Canadians and Canadian liquor were playing
in the violation of American prohibition. 17 Cranston fea-
tured it on the first page of the magazine section. It bal-
anced, in terms of page make-up, an article by the late
Fred Griffin; as a rule Griffin shared the Weekly's top as-
signments and columns with Gregory Clark. Hemingway's
story was notable for its compact, imaginative style. On
this occasion his talent dominated the material. He illus-
trated his denunciation of ambiguous Canadian laws with
an effective vignette.

I saw a slack lipped, white faced kid being supported on
either side by two scared looking boys of his own age in
an alley outside a theatre in Detroit. His face was pasty
and his eyes stared unseeingly. He was deathly sick, his
arms hanging loosely.

"Where'd he get it?" I asked one of the scared kids.

"Blew in his week's pay for a quart of Canuck boot-
legged." The two boys hauled him up the alley. "Come
on, we got to get him out of here before the cops see him."

Crime and violence had a special fascination for Heming-
way, and, of course, particularly if it were of American
origin, for his employers. He ended his 1920 association
with the Star Weekly, in the issue of December 1 1, with an
even more specific exploration of racketeers. 18 The story
was date-lined from Chicago on December 8. Hemingway
gave it authenticity by placing most of his emphasis on the
ex-killer from whom he had gotten most of his information.
"Perhaps it were better not to describe him too closely,"
he wrote, "because he might run on to a Toronto paper.

Rut he is ahniif us hanHsnmp as a fprrpf Vis fin** Visnrlc anrl

94 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

looks like a jockey a little overweight." The phrases have
the outline at least of the brief exposition in "The Killers,"
where the two gunmen's hands, as well as their slight
statures, are emphasized. The Star Weekly article even in-
cluded, as would "The Killers/' a juxtaposition of crime
and the ring. Hemingway's final paragraph had a poised,
confident tone, closer now to the idiom of his early fiction
than had been the sometimes forced, precocious material he
had sold Cranston at the beginning of 1920. It is a re-
minder that he had matured as a writer during these
months. "That's the type of mercenary that is doing the
Irishmen's killings for them. He isn't a heroic or even a
dramatic figure. He just sits hunched over his whiskey glass,
worries about how to invest his money, lets his weasel mind
run on and wishes the boys luck."

It was his fifteenth article for the Star Weekly. IQ The
stories had averaged approximately fifteen hundred words.
The fact that they had been largely written in the four
months between March and June pointed to a fairly con-
sistent production of about five thousand words of pub-
lishable material each month. He had been aided in the
formation of regular working habits. He hadn't made
much money Cranston said later 20 that "his biggest
check was $10" but he had earned enough and written
enough to legitimately think of himself as a writer and
to feel that, given time, he could ultimately make a liv-
ing through his work. This was a crucial step. At the age
of twenty-one he could regard himself as a professional. He
would thereby sift all his subsequent experiences in terms of
their possible use in his work. He had worked with men as
able as Fred Griffin and Gregory Clark. He had won their
professional respect and the confidence of his editor. Hem-
ingway's arrivals in and departures from Toronto were
frequent between 1920 and 1924, and in later years his
Canadian friends were sometimes confused as to the pre-

TORONTO 95

however, stated categorically that as early as 1920, while
"he wrote articles for the Star Weekly to keep himself in
clothes and fodder," Hemingway was also "ambitious to
become a writer" and "labored" at his writing "in his spare
hours."

v.

Hemingway returned to Chicago in the autumn of 1920,
after spending the summer in Horton Bay. He was re-
luctant to settle in his family's Oak Park home; in Chicago
he lived on the outskirts of the world of people like the re-
tired gunman and the practicing bootleggers. The Star
Weekly feature work he resumed in 1921 would reflect
this world. In the meantime he spent a great deal of time in
the Chicago gyms, and in the Italian restaurants. For a
while, very broke, he shared a furnished room with Bill
Home, his ambulance corps friend. Eventually he got a job
through a want ad in the Chicago Tribune. He became an
associate editor of Co-operative Commonwealth, a monthly
house organ by which Harrison Parker, a Chicago advertis-
ing man, was publicizing his venture of the moment. Hem-
ingway did not know much about this enterprise when
he accepted the position. His brief association with the
magazine did not increase his sense of harmony with post-
war America. He turned out a good deal of copy for the
magazine, however, and in his spare time and on the
magazine's time as well he continued with his own work.
As an episode in his apprenticeship it was by no means
comparable to the seven months in Kansas City, nor to the
period he had just spent in Toronto. It nonetheless made
certain contributions to his literary situation. His trans-
formation from a feature writer in Canada to a house organ
editor for a Chicago promoter, brief as it was, is another
well-defined gradation in his training.

CHAPTER

V

CHICAGO

"The Cooperative Society of America
. ... is a colossal shell-game."

Nation 1

Had Harrison Parker exercised occasional restraint, and
had he not been seized by political ambitions, he might have
overshadowed Samuel Insull as Chicago's success story of
the 1920's. Parker has nevertheless had a profitable career
as a devotee of the complex holding company as well as the
simpler beauties of prize contests. 2 He has made good use
of the United States Post Office, which has over the years
received many complaints about a variety of promises he
has expressed through the mails.

The Co-operative Society of America its name decep-
tively similar to that of the legitimate and highly respected
Cooperative League of the United States of America was
incorporated by Parker in Chicago on February 20, 1919.
It was created out of the ruins of the recently defunct Na-
tional Society of Fruitvalers. The new society's assets were
heavily mortgaged properties, of doubtful value, in Muske-
gan, Michigan. Its structure was that of a trust, filed by
Parker's wife. Mrs. Parker subsequently earned $1,522,609
through the sale of certificates in the society, while being
paid a salary of five hundred dollars a week as secretary of
one of the subsidiary companies. The trust named Parker
and two male associates as trustees. A trust was more at-

CHICAGO 97

tractive to Parker than either a corporation or a partnership,
since virtually unlimited powers could be assigned to
trustees.

Parker and his two lieutenants were now legally entitled
to everything that might be contributed in the future to the
society by potential subscribers. They were permitted to
sell or mortgage such contributions without the consent of
the members. They were cited in the trust agreement as
"not liable to the members for the results of their incom-
petence, or for their acts or failures to act." It was stipu-
lated that the trustees were "not to be bonded to indemnify
the members for losses arising out of dishonesty." They
were authorized to fix their own compensations. The mem-
bers, on the other hand, as the magazine Co-operation the
foremost journal of the authentic co-operative movement
pointed out bitterly in 1921, enjoyed "less opportunity for
democratic control than even the usual profit-making cor-
poration." 3 They could neither compel the trustees to pay
dividends out of the earnings of the society, nor were they
entitled to an accounting. The bait, of course, was easy
money.

Parker urged his prospective subscribers to "provide for
your old age by investing in the great Co-operative Move-
ment." He also promised an opportunity "to cut the cost
of living through the elimination of profiteering on the
necessities of life." Before an angry minority of his stock-
holders managed to bring him into court, convinced that
his campaign for governor of Illinois had been financed
with their money, Harrison Parker had acquired 81,000
contributors. From them, and through the manipulation of
the funds in a set of allied trusts, he received investments of
$11,500,000. When the society was finally adjudged bank-
rupt on October 6, 1922, in the United States District
Court in Chicago, it had acquired liabilities of $15,000,000
and retained assets of $50,000.

98 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The remaining assets, which may have formed the seed
of what Parker later called the "considerable competence"
that permitted him to retire in 1931, had been transferred
to a new organization, The Cooperators of America. Parker
was its principal trustee. In 1921, when Judge Kenesaw
Mountain Landis whose name Parker had been impu-
dently using in his promotional literature ordered Parker
to sell no more society securities in the state of Illinois, he
expressed his horror at what had been revealed about the
organization. "It is so unclean, the whole thing," Landis
said, almost in disbelief, "no matter where you touch it."
The Nation published an indignant account of Heming-
way's employer in the issue of October 19, 1922. The
article described the entire operation as "a colossal venture
in frenzied finance." 4 Some of the energy for the venture
was provided by idealistic young students from North-
western University and the University of Chicago; they
helped in the local distribution of circulars and conceived
of themselves as partners in an evangelical crusade. The sale
of securities was also prompted by the flood of pamphlets
which Parker circulated throughout the Middle West. The
principal vehicle of persuasion, however, was a monthly
publication, Co-operative Commonwealth. It was as an
editor of Parker's magazine that Hemingway supported
himself in the winter of 1920.

77.

Evangelical idealism was not the impulse which brought
Hemingway to the staff of Co-operative Commonwealth ',
although he later admitted he assumed "a co-operative thing
was straight because they had tried to start one for market-
ing apples when I worked on the farm in Michigan." In
1920 he was moved primarily by the fifty dollars a week
which the job paid. He accepted on faith the organization's

CHICAGO 99

statement that it was patterned after the old Rochdale Co-
operatives in England. The Chicago Tribune want ad made
no mention of the Co-operative Society of America, simply
advertising for someone to fill an editing job, with a box
number. "He was pretty completely out of a job and
money," his friend Bill Home recalled later, "until this
house organ editorship came along." Home and Heming-
way continued to live in the former's attic bedroom at 1230
North State Street for a brief time; then the generosity of
Y. K. Smith, the oldest of the Smith family from Horton
Bay, enabled them to move into completely different quar-
ters on Chicago's near north side. 5

Smith, a successful advertising man, was living with his
wife in a large, old-fashioned apartment at 100 East Chi-
cago Street. The flat had been sublet from Mrs. Dorothy
Aldis, a wealthy, local patroness of the arts then traveling
in Europe. "Big-hearted Y.K.," according to Roy Dickey,
Smith's former copy chief at the Critchfield agency, "had
promptly moved all his indigent friends in to share the
apartment." In addition to Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the apart-
ment now sheltered the former's younger sister, Kate, who
later married John Dos Passos; a friend of hers named Edith
Foley, a free-lance writer; Hemingway and Home; and
Donald M. Wright, another advertising man. Home and
Hemingway shared a bedroom, as did the two young
women. Wright, who was not working at the time, slept
late in the mornings and had a room to himself.

It was a very pleasant arrangement. Three of the group
were old friends of Hemingway. He had known the Smiths
since he was twelve, and Horne, of course, was an ambu-
lance corps buddy. All of them, with the exception of Mrs.
Smith, were interested in writing and were earning their
livings as writers of one sort or another. Smith was a man
of culture, widely read and perceptive, and very articulate.
Horne and Wright were both advertising men; the latter,

100 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

a friend and great admirer of Sherwood Anderson, with
whom he had done agency work, had literary ambitions.
Kate Smith and Edith Foley were collaborating on maga-
zine articles. Smith had a wide acquaintanceship in Chicago,
and a variety of interesting people continually visited the
apartment in the evenings.

It was not a bohemian atmosphere. Smith had no inten-
tion of sponsoring a miniature Latin Quarter. He was him-
self fastidious and well bred, and he was sufficiently older
than the rest so that his point of view established the gen-
eral tone of their lives, at least so far as the apartment was
concerned. Home, almost thirty, was hard-working and
ambitious. Neither Wright nor Hemingway were dissi-
pated men. Their evenings were usually spent in the apart-
ment, both by inclination and because none of the younger
tenants had much money. Smith recalled that in their con-
versations, as well as in the fraternity-type horseplay, Hem-
ingway was invariably the leader. "He was by far the most
colorful of us," Smith said later, "and very witty."

Hemingway himself was very fond of Smith. Wright
conceived of their relationship as almost that of foster
parent and son, and maintained afterwards that Heming-
way once told him that he had "learned all I know about
many things from Y.K." Smith also was more sympathetic
to Hemingway's talent than the others; until Sherwood
Anderson joined the group he was probably the only one
who sensed the extent of the young man's gifts. The rest
had various attitudes toward his work. Home, of course,
was devoted to him, admired every aspect of his character,
and, in his own phrase, remained his "hero-worshiper"
during the subsequent years. Home, however, was the least
literary of the group. Wright, the most self-consciously
literary, thought of Hemingway as a competent journalist,
but all their tastes were different; Wright was appalled by
Hemingway's turbulent realism and his positive statements

CHICAGO 101

about what was good and what was bad in writing. Smith,
the most mature and acute, felt that during the winter and
spring of 1921 Hemingway had no clear conception of
what he wanted to do, but a very real notion of what he
didn't want.

"He hated the idea of a nine to five job/' Smith said
many years later. "He wanted his freedom. He had no illu-
sions about journalism, but he'd concluded that it was at
least better than anything else he'd seen."

Despite the absence of a well-conceived philosophy or
plan of attack whose existence would have been startling
in one so young and so recently returned from the trau-
matic experience of war Hemingway was working far
harder than the rest. He was writing a great deal, both for
Co-operative Commonwealth and on his own. In the eve-
nings, when the others were idling in the living room,
Hemingway was apt to be in his room, typing. He stood
out from the others in his diligence and his intensity. In
1937 Wright published a brief sketch of the Smith group.
He remembered that Hemingway "was trying any and
every kind of writing at the time he even fired out satiri-
cal rewrites of world news to Vanity Fair, to no avail." 6

It was during these months, in this mood of almost buck-
shot literary endeavor, that Hemingway wrote two frag-
ments which were published in New Orleans by the
Double-Dealer, a little magazine, in the spring of 1922.
"A Divine Gesture," the first of these, was a brief, ironic
prose sketch, in the manner of Anatole France or such an
imitator as Ben Hecht. 7 Elaborately arch, this satire on the
triviality of mankind is so alien to Hemingway's literary
attitudes, as displayed extensively in the journalism and
fiction he wrote in Europe in 1922 and 1923, that it verifies
Wright's statement that he was attempting a variety of
mediums in Chicago. "Ultimately," the quatrain which the
Double-Dealer printed in the June issue, was somewhat

102 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

more characteristic; 8 it was not unlike the poetry of his
expatriate pamphlet of 1923, Three Stories & Ten Poems.
On the whole, however, the Double-Dealer material was
more truly juvenilia than almost anything he had written
since he left high school, abortive concessions to the milieu
in which he was temporarily living.

Hemingway was nevertheless completely serious about
mastering his trade. "Will it sell?" he would ask his friends
at the apartment, after reading one of the stories aloud. "Do
you think it will sell?" There was a real irony in his concen-
tration upon salability. While the others discussed art and
the artistic verities, and urged Hemingway to concern him-
self more with the permanent values of literature, he was
actually subjecting himself to a rigid professional discipline.
He was dismayed and angered, however as he has con-
tinued to be by too much talking in large, vague terms
about writing. "Artist, art, artistic!" he would shout. "Can't
we ever hear the last of that stuff! " While they talked about
art, with the rather easy intensity of dilettantes, Heming-
way talked about story markets, and about the fighters he
was watching in Kid Howard's gym; and above all, his
friends remembered, he talked about soldiering.

He was inevitably profiting from this literate atmosphere,
on the other hand, much as he might despise its garrulous,
uncreative aspects. He was himself interested in music and
painting and in the specific work of the artists who came to
the apartment. He told his friends that music, like writing,
had above all to be clear; his conception of painting showed
the same earnest fidelity to realism, authenticity, and im-
mediacy. The traditional picture of literary Chicago during
the early 1920's is as a sort of cornbelt Florence. The Smith
apartment was a miniature of that aspect of the city. Hem-
ingway could not help but be affected by the passionate
concern with art and craft. He had simple, absolute convic-

CHICAGO 103

tions as to the functions of writing and the responsibilities
of the writer.

"You've got to see it, feel it, smell it, hear it," he once
declared to the group. This commandment, basic to all his
subsequent work, is confirmed by Hemingway's own
memory of what he was attempting in those months.

"I was always working by myself," he said in 1952, in an
effort to define his literary debts, "years before I met
Ezra [Pound] or Gertrude [Stein]. This is how I would
do [it]. For instance I knew I always received many strong
sensations when I went into the gym to train or work out
with boxers." As he sat in the gym, wrapping his hands and
waiting to get in the ring, he would try to identify the
various smells. This was the first step of the process. The
second step isolated him even more dramatically, in a liter-
ary sense, from the rest of the Smith group. This was the
step he practiced in the evenings, while the others talked in
the living room of art and craft and the creative process.
"When I would get back from the gym," Hemingway re-
membered, "I would write [the sensations] down." Clearly
Hemingway was not merely indulging in comforting talk
when he told Don Wright that a writer must see it, feel it,
smell it, hear it.

Wright, of course, could agree that this was perhaps one
kind of writing, although he did not accept it as a total
prescription, any more than it would have been accepted by
Sherwood Anderson, the contemporary writer for whom
Wright reserved his greatest admiration. Hemingway's at-
titude toward Anderson, who was soon introduced into the
group by Wright and Smith, both of them former asso-
ciates of his in local advertising work, was a revealing one.
The other members of the group were constantly razzing
Anderson, kidding him affectionately about his flamboyant
dress, his extravagant stories, his imaginative flights. Hem-
ingway, however, was always very polite to Anderson,

104 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

quiet and attentive. His attitude might have been inter-
preted as simply that of a young apprentice sitting respect-
fully at the feet of an older and more experienced and
relatively successful writer. Smith, who was always in-
trigued by Hemingway's complex personality and attitudes,
had a different interpretation. "It probably means a storm's
brewing," he said, explaining that in his experience Hem-
ingway handled certain personal relationships like a good
boxer, encouraging his opponent to overextend himself,
growing more tense and silent as a situation developed.

Anderson, on the other hand, was from the beginning
delighted with the young newspaperman. Anderson was
then living on Division Street, not far from the Smith apart-
ment, and he visited them often that winter. He was em-
phatic in his response to and predictions about Hemingway.
"Thanks," Anderson said to his hosts the first night, "for
introducing me to that young fellow. I think he's going to
go some place." Anderson was already an important figure
in Chicago's literary life. His visits to the Smiths were
notable events. Bill Home felt that the opportunity to talk
to the various people who came to the apartment was "im-
portant to Hemingway's development as a writer," and he
was certain that "the high point of those evenings was when
Sherwood Anderson would come over and spend the eve-
ning with us." Hemingway continued to be polite and
respectful, but occasionally he revealed a little of what he
was already thinking. He was thoroughly hostile, inevita-
bly, to Anderson's concept of unconscious art. Once or
twice he was vocally critical of Anderson's style.

"You couldn't let a sentence like that go," Hemingway
once said after Anderson had left, taking with him the
story he had just read aloud. This was the beginning of
Anderson's period of great success, however, and he was
totally unaware of the doubts which existed in the critical
mind of his young friend. Anderson never claimed to have

CHICAGO 105

influenced Hemingway's work as a whole. The most he
ever said was that it was "through my efforts" that Hem-
ingway "first got published." Anderson was very explicit
about this. "Anyway it is sure," he wrote twenty years
later in his Memoirs, "that if others said I had shown Hem-
ingway the way, I myself had never said so. I thought . . .
that he had his own gift, which had nothing particularly to
do with me." 9

Anderson then added a charitable sentence which con-
firms the testimony of the other members of the Smith
clique. "Absorption in his ideas," Anderson speculated, try-
ing to analyze the impulse which caused Hemingway to
satirize him in 1926 in The Torrents of Springy "may have
affected his capacity for friendship." Certainly there was
no doubt about the intensity or conviction with which
Hemingway regarded writing. One was either with him or
against him. There could be no compromise or variation.
As an attitude this did not encourage permanent relation-
ships with other writers. His mistrust of Anderson was
vocational rather than personal. His actual debt to Ander-
son was a large one.

The praise and sponsorship of a respected, productive
writer were of very real value both psychologically and
professionally. They contributed to the strength and con-
fidence which would sustain him during the forthcoming
period of rejection. Hemingway was bolstered in his ar-
tistic intentions by the knowledge that Anderson was
achieving recognition with something of the same kind of
material as his own. Gregory Clark remembered that Hem-
ingway read Anderson's work constantly in Toronto.
Anderson was a spur, a symbol, as well as a tangible ma-
terial prop, a promise that a man could write what he felt
and still find a market. As individuals, however, they were
so fundamentally in competition that they could not remain
close for any length of time.

106 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

"They were very much alike in their vanity," according
to Don Wright, "and in the delight they each took in the
eff ect they had on others. Both of them were always saying,
'Look, I put something over, didn't I!* "

The primary value of the winter in Chicago was in the
compulsion to produce work constantly. "I think that
probably the only thing about this particular deal which
contributed to Hemmy's writing future/' maintained
Home, who continued to see Hemingway until the 1930's r
"was the fact that it kept him writing." There were be-
tween fifty and sixty pages to be filled each month in Co-
operative Commonwealth. Although Harrison Parker took
freely from the material of legitimate co-operative maga-
zines, Hemingway was responsible for delivering a good
deal of original copy. The magazine stressed human in-
terest stories; Hemingway thus continued in effect the
same type of features he had been writing in Toronto. He
was also responsible for what he referred to as "thinking
and planning of editorials." His hours were elastic. The
understanding was that he would do a good deal of his
work at home.

Hemingway's job which he once referred to as "man-
aging editor" owed its existence to the recent transfor-
mation of Co-operative Commonwealth into a monthly.
The magazine was being slicked up during the autumn of
1920, under the new editorship of Richard Loper, as part
of Parker's renewed campaign for members. Hemingway's
brief tenure occurred, therefore, during a time when pro-
fessional standards had replaced the amateurish informality
and irregular publication of earlier months. The magazine
was now well edited, with excellent layouts, good caption-
ing, clear text, and a lavish use of photographs. There was
a skillful reliance on devices that would interest the unso-
phisticated audience at which the house organ was directed.
The magazine emphasized that it regarded "the members as

CHICAGO 107

of utmost importance to the co-operative movement,"
promising "to print all we can about the membership." 10 It
included briskly written personal notes, news of engage-
ments and weddings, and descriptions of members' vaca-
tions. Hemingway was again being conditioned, as on the
Kansas City Star and the Toronto Star Weekly, to write
entertaining and provocative material. Biblical phrases and
similes occurred frequently in the articles and editorials;
the evangelical quality Parker sought to cast across the
movement was always present in neat, controlled rations.
The editorials emphasized pious instruction on such topics
as, "What Is Idealism?" The magazine's cover and format,
even to the size, type, and design, were studiously modeled
on those of the legitimate co-operative publications.

Hemingway could not have been placed in an atmosphere
better calculated to increase his distaste for certain Ameri-
can values and his determination to avoid permanent
bondage to any such employment. The Co-operative So-
ciety of America differed from American business as a
whole only in the fact that Parker's intentions were fraudu-
lent. His approach to his product, the techniques used
in merchandising it, and the audience instincts to which
he appealed, were characteristic of the surface appear-
ance of American commercial life. It was incongruous
employment for a skeptical young veteran with a fixed
set of personal ethics; on the other hand, of course, it sharp-
ened Hemingway's acute sense of the ironic and paradoxi-
cal, and increased his personal ambitions as a writer.

Nor was the environment of the Smith apartment one
that would increase his satisfaction with the importance or
validity of conventional values. The young advertising men
and artists who spent their evenings at East Chicago Street
both the tenants and their friends had in varying de-
grees the same attitude toward commerce as those which
Sherwood Anderson was expressing in his conversation and

108 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

his work. A few of them were serious students of possible
solutions to the ambiguities of materialistic values. Most of
them, however, expressed an attitude which was also Hem-
ingway's. They mocked the entire situation both as it in-
volved them personally and in the larger terms of the
system as a whole.

u We had much fun after hours," Wright remembered,
"telling yarns about the scheming of the low grade morons
who were our bosses in agencies and magazines." Smith
summed up the general attitude when he said of the presi-
dential campaign of 1920 that "Harding is elected and the
Revolution is assured." During the 1930's Wright sold to
the trade journal Advertising & Selling a series of articles
called "A Mid- Western Ad Man Remembers." In one of
these he described the Smith group as an example of the
"many literary-advertising 'gangs' " then current in Chi-
cago, and included a paragraph or two about "the burlesque
advertising plans" with which Hemingway entertained
them in the evenings. One of the plans, according to
Wright, had to do with bottling blood at the stockyards
and selling it "in gooey kidd-ee copy as 'Bull Gore for Big-
ger Babies/ " n Hemingway's skepticism about advertising
quickly extended to the Co-operative Society of America.
Before long he was regaling his friends with stories about
the scheme. Smith remembered the cynical delight with
which Hemingway repeated a declaration by one of Park-
er's front men that "the membersVe got a voice but not a
vote."

"I worked until I was convinced it was crooked," Hem-
ingway said many years later, "stayed on a little while
thinking I could write and expose it, and then decided to
just rack it up as experience and the hell with it."

Home remembered distinctly that toward the end of
Hemingway's employment with Co-operative Common-
wealth he "became very much wrought up about it."

CHICAGO 109

Home also remembered the denunciation Hemingway as-
sembled and optimistically offered to several Chicago news-
papers. "I know that none of them would touch it," Home
said, adding, quite rightly, that "Mr. Parker was riding
pretty high at that time and the papers probably thought he
was too hot to handle." Hemingway continued at the
magazine into the spring of 1921. He had met Hadley
Richardson, whom he would marry in September she had
come to Chicago from St. Louis to visit Kate Smith, a class-
mate and close friend and he was neither personally un-
happy nor ethically desperate about his job. He worked
hard, both at the office and in the evenings. He was writing
constantly, stories and articles that were rejected monoton-
ously by American magazines, avant garde experiments
such as those accepted by the Double -Dealer, and features
and editorials for his employers. "I tried to write, on their
time, all the time," Hemingway once explained. He sent a
few articles up to Toronto, consolidating his single promis-
ing alliance in journalism. Cranston welcomed his contri-
butions. He bought them promptly for the Star Weekly.
For a time he even elevated Hemingway to the dignity of
a personal column.

Three of Hemingway's seven Star Weekly articles in
1921 were printed as three-column, rectangular boxes with
his centrally-placed by-line in bold-face type only slightly
smaller than the twelve-point, single line titles, drawn from
the particular material, with which the columns were
headed. 12 Cranston presented a fourth article in essentially
the same format, retaining the large, single line caption and
the three-column box, this time with Hemingway's name in
small, conventional Star Weekly by-line type at the head of
the left-hand column. 13 Another of his stories was given the
identical box presentation with a four-line caption. 14 Crans-
ton further stressed the columnist role by using several of
these five articles on the same page of their respective is-

110 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

sues; there was even an ironic consistency in the regularity
with which the Star Weekly misspelled his by-line as
"Hemmingway." 15

Hemingway was as pleased as Cranston with the arrange-
ment. When it became clear early in 1921 that the Co-
operative Commonwealth was a dead end, Y. K. Smith
had taken him around to Critchfield's, the Chicago adver-
tising agency where both he and Sherwood Anderson, as
well as Don Wright, had all worked at one time or another.
Roy Dickey, the copy chief, had no jobs available, and he
noticed that Hemingway at least pretended a lack of con-
cern. He told Dickey he already had a job, "supplying a
column," Dickey remembered, to the Toronto Star. This
was in part bravado, since the financial return on these oc-
casional columns was minute, but he could take legitimate
satisfaction in the prominence Cranston gave to whatever
he received. It was an encouraging antidote to the otherwise
consistent rejection. The freedom Cranston allowed his
free-lance staff was particularly refreshing after the slanted
fraud of Co-operative Commonwealth, and, at the other
extreme, the doctrinaire principles of Art enunciated in the
nightly sessions at the apartment. A columnist's license was
a fine safety valve for Hemingway in 1921.

Hemingway's seven articles for the Star Weekly in 1921
they averaged about a thousand words apiece reflect,
inevitably in so subjective a newspaperman, the influence
of the months he spent in the United States after leaving
Toronto in the spring of 1920. Two of his stories dealt
specifically with the Chicago underworld. All of them
made at least indirect use of such American themes as big
league baseball, the Muscle Shoals debate, national vacation
habits, and various aspects of the American character which

CHICAGO 111

would increase Canadian convictions about the vulgarities
of their neighbors. Hemingway had showed from the be-
ginning, in his high school parodies as well as his first work
for Cranston in 1920, an instinctive sense of audience tastes.
His work for Co-operative Commonwealth had increased
this natural capacity. He was careful to locate a Toronto
angle for each of his 1921 articles.

There was an element in this journalistic facility, how-
ever, which went beyond the casual expertness of voca-
tional instinct and experience. Hemingway's commitment
to satire, previously no more than a recurrent feature of
his journalism, was now definite and apparent. His impulse
toward irony, evident in his immediate affinity for Ring
Lardner, had probably been checked, though never in-
hibited, in Kansas City. The atmosphere of both the Star
and the prosperous Midwestern city as a whole, after all,
was primarily one of literate optimism. Neither William
Rockhill Nelson nor his heirs and editors saw life in a sar-
donic way. The letters and postcards Hemingway sent
home from Italy in 1918 showed that his excitement at first
overcame any tendency toward skepticism about the war.
Later, after he had been wounded, his attitude began to
change. His satiric talent required more maturity and ex-
perience than he could have possessed in 1918. It also re-
quired a sustained encounter with provocatively deceitful
situations. This encounter occurred in a variety of ways in
northern Michigan and in Chicago, and in Toronto itself,
from 1919 through 1921.

There was a new sophistication in Hemingway's humor.
It even permitted him to inject burlesque into his out-of-
doors material, relieving what had often been the solemnity
of the enthusiast. In May he sent Cranston a column about
American resorts. 16 His theme was that the best guarantee
of a long, healthy life was to violate the traditional Ameri-
can insistence on annual vacations. He described several

112 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

typical summer colonies. "Beautiful Lake Flyblow," he
wrote, "nestles like a plague spot in the heart of the great
north woods. All around it rise the majestic hills. Above it
towers the majestic sky. On every side of it is the majestic
shore. The shore is lined with majestic dead fish dead of
loneliness."

Most of his wit was more specifically critical than his
sketches of Smiling Lake Wah Wah and Picturesque Bum
View. His first column, published on February 19, 1921,
was organized on the hypothesis that what he called "public
entertainers" statesmen, politicians, newspapers, artists,
and athletes could be advantageously traded between na-
tions as players are traded in professional baseball. 17 He
visualized "the biggest literary deal of the decade . . . trans-
ferring Anatole France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Vol-
taire from France to the United States in exchange for
Harold Bell Wright, Owen Johnson, Robert W. Chambers
and $800,000 in gold." He satirized the complacent ignor-
ance of newspapermen. "Rousseau and Voltaire, whose first
name could not be learned at a late hour, are dead."

In another long column about the farce of American
prohibition, printed under the caption, "Chicago Never
Wetter Than It Is Today," Hemingway described a char-
acteristic "members only" speakeasy, at which, he said,
"there has never been any record of anyone being black
balled," and went on to mock the entire experiment. 18
"There are eight federal prohibition enforcement officers
in Chicago. Four of them are doing office work, the other
four are guarding a warehouse." His whole tone, in fact,
indicated a hostility to contemporary America that went
beyond the necessities of flattering Toronto readers with
tales of American inferiority. He talked often to his friends
in the Smith group about his eagerness and determination
to get back to Europe. His restlessness covered almost every
aspect of the United States. Even what he had seen of

CHICAGO 113

American soldiers overseas contributed to his jaundice. One
night in Chicago he tried to explain to Y. K. Smith the
difference between the American and Italian temperaments.
Characteristically, his metaphor was war, and he discussed
the humiliation of the Caporetto defeat for Italian individual
and national pride. Then he imagined American soldiers
after such a catastrophe. "At this point," he told Smith,
4 'four of them would present themselves as a quartet, billed
as The Caporetto Kids."

Hemingway clarified this distaste for American insensi-
tivity and provincial arrogance in one of the paragraphs of
his fantasy about trading international figures. He described
the ceremonies in Stratford that would follow the purchase
of Shakespeare's citizenship by the United States. "The
little English town on the Avon," he wrote, "was decked
with American flags and all the buildings were placarded.
We Wanted Bill, and We Got Him, and Yea Bill! You
Brought Home the Bacon were the legends on some of the
placards. Floats were borne in a parade depicting Shake-
speare wearing the clothes of a widely advertised American
tailor and bearing this sign: Big Bill Shakespeare One
Hundred Per Cent. American." 19

His satire often contained cheap and easy elements, since
it was sometimes written in haste and with the vocational
cynicism inevitable after his Co-operative Commonwealth
chores. Occasionally, too, as in a long, dull analysis of the
Muscle Shoals controversy, his paragraphs were the bored,
automatic contrivances and lazy cliches of a hack journal-
ist. 20 His writing as well as his attitudes could be affected
by his study of American fiction markets and techniques.
A May story about a Chicago killing confirms in essence at
least a vague recollection by his friends at the Smith apart-
ment that he was trying to sell short stories in 1920 and
1921 to the pulp magazine Argosy. Unlike most of

114 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

ingway's journalism, the dispatch would be unrecognizable
as his were it not for the by-line.

Anthony D'Andrea, pale and spectacled, defeated candi-
date for alderman of the 19th ward, Chicago, stepped out
of the closed car in front of his residence and holding an
automatic pistol in his hand, backed gingerly up the steps.

Reaching back with his left hand to press the door bell,
he was blinded by two red jets of flame from the window
of the next apartment, heard a terrific roar and felt himself
clouted sickeningly in the body with the shock of the slugs
from the sawed-off shot gun. 21

The article indicated his capacity for stock language and
stale melodrama. The Muscle Shoals story showed another
alternative of newspaper work, a degeneration of his im-
aginative vitality into mechanical competence. These were
the two extremes, tempting and secure, in which most
gifted young writers foundered when they chose journal-
ism as an apprenticeship. This was bread and butter writing,
commendable in a newly married man but a symptomatic
warning for an ambitious writer.

He and Hadley Richardson had been married, in fact,
for only a little over two months when the Muscle Shoals
article appeared. They were married in September in Hor-
ton Bay. The wedding party included most of Heming-
way's oldest friends Carl Edgar, Bill Smith, Brumback,
and Kate Smith. Since his bride, a gifted pianist who sym-
pathized with his restlessness, was as anxious as he to go to
Europe, Hemingway renewed his efforts to arrange some
solution that would get them abroad. His determination to
escape America must have been strengthened by another
ceremony he attended that autumn, this one in Chicago on
November 20, 1921. General Armando Diaz presented
Hemingway with Italy's Medaglia d'Argento al Valore

CHICAGO 115

Militaire and with the Croce ad Merito di Guerra. Gregory-
Clark, the Star Weekly's feature editor, who had always
been skeptical of Hemingway's Italian war experiences,
automatically turned the medals on edge, to check the in-
scriptions, when Hemingway showed them to him in
Toronto the next month. "As long as I live," Clark wrote
in 1950, "I shall never forget the cold chill that leaped out,
radiating, from my back and over my shoulders and into
my cheeks. For on the edge was inscribed: 'Tenente Er-
nesto Hemingway/ "

Hemingway and his wife spent the late fall of 1921 in
Toronto. His final Star Weekly article that year, published
on December 17, was a return to the deft humor of per-
sonal journalism rather than the pulp techniques of the
D'Andrea killing. 22 Cranston again set up the material as a
column, with the caption On Weddynge Gyftes in
large, Old English type. There was a sketch of a troubled
bride and groom staring at a group of wedding presents that
consisted solely of traveling clocks. Beneath the drawing
Hemingway began his wry lament with some verse written
in what his lead paragraph called "the best of the late 1921
rhythms."

Three traveling clocks

Tick

On the mantelpiece

Comma

But the young man is starving.

This "unpersonal protest against wedding gifts as an
institution" was an illustration of the kind of lively talent
that now made possible an arrangement by which he and
his wife went abroad for the next twenty months. A week
before the wedding gifts story was published, Hemingway
was "off to Europe to become roving correspondent for the

116 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Star, with headquarters in Paris." 23 He went under the spon-
sorship of John Bone, managing editor of the Daily Star,
although for a time his overseas correspondence appeared
exclusively in the Star Weekly. Bone had noticed the
quality of Hemingway's feature work for Cranston in 1920
and 1921; the young American had also done a little routine
reporting for the city desk in 1921. The assignment gave
Hemingway almost complete freedom of movement and a
virtually unlimited choice of material. The Star agreed to
pay regular space rates for all the stories they printed,
as well as their correspondent's expenses in getting the
stories.

It was from the Hemingways' point of view an ideal
solution. Backed by a little money of their own to tide them
over between the periodic settlement of the Star's account,
they would certainly be able to get by financially. Consid-
ering that he was not yet twenty-three, it was an en-
couraging testimonial to the reputation he had achieved in
Toronto and to the confidence which Bone, an unsenti-
mental, exacting editor, placed in him. 24 Like the earlier
steps in his apprenticeship, it was an appropriate extension
of his development. He required the liberty of such an as-
signment, away from the Chicago and Toronto atmospheres
of markets and slanted journalese and feverish dilettantism.
Years later he told his friend Harvey Breit of the New
York Times that he had never been able to work well when
he was bored. 25 He was in 1921 thoroughly bored with
North America. One reason his Star Weekly output had
been as low as it was that year, according to Cranston, was
an additional indication of his need for the creative at-
mosphere of Paris; he "spent much of his time," Cranston
said, "working on his fiction."

Sherwood Anderson, of course, was the one man who
could most appreciate Hemingway's sensations about the
forthcoming escape to Europe. The older writer had him-

CHICAGO 117

self just returned from his first trip abroad. His conversa-
tion was full of the opportunity for literary and cultural
enrichment which existed in Paris. Anderson later said that
his most vivid memory of Hemingway was a scene which
occurred just before the latter left. Hemingway packed all
the canned food from his and Hadley's apartment into a
knapsack and brought it around to Anderson the night be-
fore they went. "That was a nice idea," Anderson wrote in
his Memoirs, "bringing thus to a fellow scribbler the food
he had to abandon. ... I remember his coming up the stairs,
a magnificent broad-shouldered man, shouting as he
came." 26 Hemingway's compulsion to go to Europe was a
genuine one. The mass expatriation of young American
artists had not yet begun. There was nothing imitative in
his impulse toward Paris. It was at that moment a necessity
in his personal and artistic life. "Greg," he said impatiently
to his friend Gregory Clark about this time in Toronto,
"you're going to peter out your life on a warm hearth-
stone." Hemingway had to be moving on, physically and
professionally.

CHAPTER
VI

EUROPE

"A friend of mine and a very delightful
man, Ernest Hemingway, and his wife
are leaving for Pans. ..."

SHERWOOD ANDERSON 1

The Hemingways sailed for Europe on December 8,
armed with letters of introduction from Anderson. They
were also preceded by a note he had sent at the end of
November to Lewis Galantiere, a young Chicagoan inter-
ested in the arts and then working for the American Sec-
tion of the International Chamber of Commerce. Anderson
was very generous, speaking of Hemingway as "a young
fellow of extraordinary talent." He did not hesitate to
launch his friend with the same extravagance he would
have employed a few months earlier on a new account for
the Critchfield agency; "he has been a quite wonderful
newspaper man," Anderson told Galantiere. He also added
the certification that was apparently already required in the
presentation of young Americans bound for alcoholic Paris.
"He is not like [Harold] Stearns."

As if to confirm this assurance of sobriety, the Heming-
ways traveled not by way of Cherbourg and a boat train to
the capital, but by the roundabout route to Spain and then
slowly north by rail to France. They were enormously ex-
cited by the whole trip. "You ought to see the Spanish
coast," Hemingway wrote back to the Andersons. 2 "Big

EUROPE 119

brown mountains looking like tired dinosaurs slumped
down into the sea." He described the scene carefully, using
his correspondence, as has frequently been his custom, for
a kind of trial run of prose effects. It was a thoughtful, care-
fully composed letter; as such it constituted a very graceful
compliment to Anderson.

They settled temporarily at the Hotel Jacob, where
Galantiere lived. During the next few days they were too
busy even to mail Anderson's letters of introduction. Hem-
ingway was very happy to be back in Paris. "What a
town," he exclaimed to Anderson. They went to the Dome
and to the Rotonde, and, like all cheerful tourists, they
thought things must be even cheaper than when the Ander-
sons had been there in 1920. Soon, Hemingway told the
Andersons, he would send out the letters of introduction,
"like launching a flock of ships." In the meantime he had
already begun his first dispatch. "I've been earning our
daily bread on this write machine," he said. The material
he now began to send back to Toronto had the same inti-
mate, impressionistic quality he had sought in the letter to
Sherwood and Tennessee Anderson.

This was in no way a breach of journalistic responsibility.
It was precisely the kind of treatment the Star wanted from
a foreign correspondent. That he should have gone abroad
under the sponsorship of the Toronto paper was one fur-
ther piece of occupational good fortune for Hemingway.
The European bureau of a Chicago or New York paper
would have required a routine of precise, factual reporting.
There would have been a virtual prohibition against the
kind of material and the kind of handling of that material
which would form a profitable education for fiction and
its techniques. The Star, on the other hand, wanted lively,
entertaining dispatches, intimate and subjective.

Like all Canadian papers of the period, the Star relied
primarily on the English and American wire services for

120 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

its daily coverage of foreign events. These were supple-
mented, in the case of the Star, by its purchase of the excel-
lent overseas coverage of the Chicago Daily News. A paper
as nationalistic as Joseph E. Atkinson's, priding itself too on
its metropolitan stature, was never satisfied with this com-
promise. The situation became so intolerable to Canadian
publishers as a whole that in 1927 the Canadian Press
comparable in a limited way to the Associated Press sent
a Canadian newsman to London as its staff correspondent.

In 1922, however, the problem could be solved only by
sending one's own employees abroad. Two or three papers
in addition to the Star were at that time represented by
correspondents working, like Hemingway, on a part-time
basis. The Canadian resident press, such as it was, was not
appointed with the intention of providing a better spot
coverage than was available through the Associated Press
and Reuters. Its job was either to supplement that coverage
with the interpretive reporting generally disavowed by the
agencies, or to provide colorful material about Europe, its
people, and its customs. Anderson, in fact perhaps unin-
tentionally had used an excellent phrase in his letter of
introduction to Galantiere; he told his friend that Heming-
way had been hired "to do European letters."

Hemingway's manner as the Star's correspondent was
followed precisely by Matthew Halton, who was the paper's
very successful London representative from 1932 until
1940. Like Hemingway, Halton's style was lively and in-
formal; like Hemingway, too, he occasionally cabled spot
news and background material of immediate Canadian inter-
est. The bulk of both their dispatches, however, was mailed.
David Rogers, another Star reporter, younger than Hem-
ingway, who went to Europe in 1929 on the same part-time
basis, described his own failure in the job as stemming from
his misconception of his duties. "My mistake," Rogers said
many years later, when he had become a prominent Cana-

EUROPE 121

dian editor, "was based on the idea that a serious job could
be done." The most extensive assessment of Canadian news
coverage, a sober volume sponsored by the Institute of
International Affairs, severely indicts Canadian foreign cor-
respondents on the same grounds.

"Those staff men who are sent abroad on special or roving
assignments/' according to Carlton McNaught, author of
Canada Gets the News, "seldom add appreciably to a news-
paper reader's knowledge of significant developments in the
countries they visit." 3 Although McNaught, writing in
1940, did not deal with Hemingway's work, he might well
have been describing the young American's stories. Heming-
way's approach was essentially the type McNaught was
condemning. "Their material," he concluded, "is most fre-
quently of the colourful . . . variety which makes entertain-
ing reading." McNaught quoted in confirmation a Halifax
editor's conclusion that the Canadian correspondents of this
period were "absorbed completely by the feature, human
interest and freak stories and give no evidence of thinking
about things that should be fundamental." David Rogers,
the young reporter who went abroad for the Star in 1929,
reached the same rueful conclusion. "They only wanted
froth," he said in 1952.

Froth, however, was precisely what Hemingway was
interested in, froth, that is, in the sense of subjective, exposi-
tory narrative evoked from responses and emotions and
personal interpretations. One of his first stories, mailed to
Toronto probably from Paris, but datelined Vigo, Spain
and published in the Star Weekly on February 18, 1922,
was a description of this Spanish harbor where he and his
wife landed in December. 4 The story contained no illumi-
nation of Spain's political or economic situation, but it was
vivid and readable; its composition was also of far more
value to him as an apprentice writer than would have been
the presentation, for example, of an account of tariff nego-

122 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

tiations between the American ambassador and the Spanish
foreign minister. His lead paragraph was precise and meta-
phoric. He used a phrase he had already tested in his letter
to Anderson.

Vigo is a pasteboard looking village, cobble streeted,
white and orange plastered, set up on one side of a big,
almost landlocked harbor that is large enough to hold the
entire British navy. Sun-baked brown mountains slump
down to the sea like tired old dinosaurs, and the color of
the water is as blue as a chromo of the bay at Naples.

Hemingway listed the wealth of potential catches in "the
bright, blue chromo of a bay." His description of the pur-
suit of tuna was clear and forceful; by the standards of his
later work, however, it was still overwritten. In a few
months, after working with Pound, he would be wary of
such easy effects as "a silver splatter in the sea" and "a
bushel full of buckshot."

Two stories datelined Les Avants, Switzerland, fruit of
a Swiss trip in January, 1922, illustrated this same concern
with atmosphere and people, as well as the glib, knowing
vernacular of the experienced traveler-newspaperman. To
the Star Weekly, read by subscribers who were both curi-
ous about and ignorant of contemporary Europe, he first
mailed a dispatch that analyzed the cost of a holiday in
Switzerland. 5 His story was an elaboration of the monetary
crisis as a result of which "parts of the country that were
jammed with a tourist population before the war now look
like the deserted boom towns of Nevada."

The second Swiss article, which the Star Weekly did not
use until a month later, when he was already back in Paris,
was much better, full of sly innuendo and sharp portraiture,
and containing several deliberate touches for a Canadian
audience. 6 He described the terrain, "wild as the Canadian

EUROPE 123

Rockies," and explained that at each bend in the road were
"four monstrous hotels, looking like mammoth children's
playhouses of the iron dog on the front lawn period of
Canadian architecture." An instinctive storyteller, as Crans-
ton had recognized from the beginning, and himself ab-
sorbed in the variety of people he was meeting, he took
his readers inside the hotels, which "in winter are filled
with utterly charming young men, with rolling white
sweaters and smoothly brushed hair, who make a good liv-
ing playing bridge." He characterized the other guests in
a vivid sketch that was not characteristic of standard Star
Weekly portraiture.

Then there are the French aristocracy. These are not the
splendid aristocracy of toothless old women and white
mustached old men. . . . The French aristocracy that comes
to Switzerland consists of very young men who wear very
old names and very tight in the knees riding breeches with
equal grace. . . . When the young men with the old names
come into a room full of profiteers, sitting with their pre-
money wives and post-money daughters, it is like seeing a
slim wolf walk into a pen of fat sheep. It seems to puncture
the value of the profiteers' titles. No matter what their
nationality, they have a heavy, ill-at-ease look.

The paragraph was an indication of the closeness with
which Hemingway was observing his new milieu. He re-
turned from Switzerland to Paris to observe some of his
countrymen; a few weeks later the Star Weekly used a long
story which it headlined, "American Bohemians In Paris A
Weird Lot." 7

The dispatch was a revealing one. It contained an inten-
sity of statement and attitude not often found in journalism
at the Star Weekly level. His point of view was happily
chosen. In adopting the thesis that most bohemians are

124 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

bogus freaks he was both gratifying the prejudices of his
readers and permitting himself a deeply felt declaration of
artistic principle. Hemingway lashed out at what he saw
as the posturings of synthetic artists. At the age of twenty-
two he was repelled by the "strange-acting and strange-
looking breed that crowd the tables of the Cafe Rotonde."

They are nearly all loafers expending the energy that an
artist puts into his creative work in talking about what they
are going to do and condemning the work of all artists who
have gained any degree of recognition. By talking about art
they obtain the same satisfaction that the real artist does in
his work. That is very pleasant, of course, but they insist
upon posing as artists.

In his anger Hemingway momentarily lost his balance as
a working feature writer; his final paragraph revolved
around a name which must have mystified his Toronto
readers. He told them that "since the good old days when
Charles Baudelaire led a purple lobster on a leash through
the same old Latin Quarter, there has not been much good
poetry written in cafes." He translated poetic activity into
a rather cheap idiom his audience might grasp. "Even then
I suspect that Baudelaire parked the lobster with the con-
cierge down on the first floor, put the chloroform bottle
corked on the washstand and sweated and carved at the
Fleurs du Mai alone with his ideas and his paper as all
artists have worked before and since."

He was in reality writing an editorial of denunciation,
encouraged by his paper's requirements, his freedom as a
by-lined writer, and his own convictions. Like any good
editorial writer he had provided a brutal illustration of
the Rotonde's habitues. He described "a big, light-haired
woman sitting at a table with three young men."

EUROPE 125

The big woman is wearing a picture hat of the "Merry
Widow" period and is making jokes and laughing hysteri-
cally. The three young men laugh whenever she does. The
waiter brings the bill, the big woman pays it, settles her hat
on her head with slightly unsteady hands, and she and the
three young men go out together. . . . Three years ago she
came to Paris with her husband from a little town in Con-
necticut, where they had lived and he had painted with
increasing success for ten years. Last year he went back to
America alone.

It was effective journalese; it was also a persuasive state-
ment of his creed. When he summed it up "you can find
anything you are looking for at the Rotonde, except serious
artists" he had written his most successful dispatch as a
foreign correspondent. Its lack of compassion was in part
justified by its absolute, vigorous conviction. The Star
Weekly gave it a full column and four banks of ten head-
lines. As a declaration it was composed of equal parts of
his incongruous debt to the mores of Oak Park, the pro-
vincialism of his newspaper, and his own passionate belief
in the seriousness of art. It also had a finished maturity of
prose, and the intense interest in human situations plus
the unscrupulous use of their biographies which makes
more understandable his apparent transformation, during
the next four years, from an obscure string correspondent
into a finished technician. When The Sun Also Rises was
published, in 1926, one of his Paris associates, Robert
McAlmon, was surprised at its "sleekness." 8 McAlmon
would have been less surprised had he known as few peo-
ple apparently did the extent and nature of Hemingway's
journalism between 1920 and 1924. It would be some time,
however, before he wrote another article as eloquent or as
vivid. The stories he sent to Toronto between its publica-
tion and the earlier Swiss dispatches were much more typi-

126 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

cal of his foreign correspondence. They were also more
revealing as to his precocious determination to practice his
serious writing and his growing impatience with news-
paper work.

By the second week in March, 1922, Hemingway was
already writing Anderson that "this goddamn newspaper
stuff is gradually ruining me." 9 He described his plans to
"cut it all loose pretty soon and work for about three
months." It was to his credit that he stuck with the Star
Weekly chore. His frame of mind makes all the more not-
able his ability to manufacture, as he did, journalistic drama
out of the Wednesday luncheon gossip of the Anglo-
American Press Association in Paris. He wrote about Paris
hats "with a girdle of stuffed English sparrows," and he
wrote from a colleague's reminiscences a breezy description
of the recent papal elections and coronation in Rome. 10 The
tone was completely appropriate for Anglican Toronto,
with its mistrust of Quebec and French Canada. "They
crowned the Pope on a plain pine board throne put together
just for that. It reminded me of a fraternity initiation when
I saw the throne and watched them getting the scenery
out the day before."

Although two months of feature writing had already
exasperated Hemingway, and although he was thoroughly
frustrated by the encroachments it made upon his serious
work, he was still intrigued by the sensation of being on
the inside. This was the tonic which enabled him to vitalize
his foreign correspondence. Years later, trying to define
the attitude he had held toward journalism, he explained
that he quit reporting because "I found I would put my
own stuff into it and then, once written, it would be gone."
His determination to have three months for his own work
in the spring of 1922 was painfully reflected in the stubborn

EUROPE 127

industry with which he produced Star Weekly material in
February and March, trying to get together enough money
to exchange hack work for a sustained period of creative
writing. He mailed nine articles back to Toronto during
those few days. He had two dispatches in each of the first
three March issues on the 4th, the llth, and 18th and
three in the March 25 number. He returned to French dress
for one brief sketch which contained most of the elements
of his heavy March publication. 11

His lead was labored and unconvincing, a pretext for a
passage of dialogue between two Frenchmen who had not
seen each other since the demobilization. Hemingway pre-
sented them as they met by chance on a bus and discussed
their domestic grievances.

"Your hair, Henri! " said one.

"My wife, old one, she cuts it. But your hair also? It is

not too chic!''

"My wife too. She cuts it also. She says barbers are dirty

pigs, but at the finish I must give her the same tip as I would

give the barber."

"Ah, the hair is a small matter. Regard these shoes."
"My poor old friend! Such shoes. It is incredible."
"It is my wife's system. She goes into the shoe shop and

says, *I want a pair of shoes for mon mari. Not expensive.

Mon mari's feet are this much longer than mine, I believe,

and about this much wider. That will do nicely. Wrap them

up.' Old one it is terrible!"

The article as a whole was more reminiscent of the Kansas
City Star than of conventional foreign correspondence. It
had the inverted narrative and anecdotal quality; it was
vivified by fresh and authentic speech. The dialogue was at
one level merely slick and amusing, but it also had the pic-
torial quality of a more experienced fictionalist. The lines

128 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

with which Henri portrayed his wife were skillful char-
acterization. Hemingway was also experimenting with the
problem of translating rhythm and idiom from one language
to another he would be widely praised for this eighteen
years later in For Whom the Bell Tolls and there was a
neat, unlabored irony in the final complacence of the two
husbands. The total effect, however, was artificial. Hem-
ingway was manufacturing the material to a formula, ex-
ploiting the exhaustless reader interest in anything strange
and alien particularly if it also increased their smug con-
tempt for the strange and alien and he was enlivening the
treatment with well-written dialogue and a lead that was
sharp and startling despite its contrived quality.

The second dispatch which was used that same week, on
the following page, reproduced the technique. 12 The head-
line "How'd You Like To Tip/Postman Every Time?"
showed that the Toronto copy desk continued to grasp
the essential appeal of his method. "Tipping the postman,"
Hemingway had written as a lead, "is the only way to
insure the arrival of your letters in certain parts of Spain."
The next step in the formula, once again, was to dramatize
the lead.

The postman comes in sight down the street waving a
letter. "A letter for the Senor," he shouts. He hands it to
you.

"A splendid letter, is it not, Senor? I, the postman, brought
it to you. Surely the good postman will be well rewarded
for the delivery of such a splendid letter?"

You tip the postman. It is a little more than he had ex-
pected. He is quite overcome.

"Senor," says the postman, "I am an honest man. Your
generosity has touched my heart. Here is another letter. I
had intended to save it for tomorrow to ensure another

EUROPE 129

reward from the always generous Senor. But here it is. Let
us hope that it will be as splendid a letter as the first!"

The formula persisted as he returned to the material of
his visit to Switzerland during January. The earlier Swiss
stories, published a month apart, on February and March
4, had both been datelined Les Avants; this one was mailed
from or at least datelined Chamby sur Montreux, not far
from Lausanne. 13 His subject was the Swiss luge, "pro-
nounced looge," which he described in his lead as not only
"the Swiss flivver," but "also the Swiss canoe, the Swiss
horse and buggy, the Swiss pram., and the Swiss combina-
tion riding horse and taxi." His exposition was provocative
and completely individual. The article included several con-
cessions to the Canadian point of view he was apt to ignore
in his European journalism for the Star. In his lead he ex-
plained that the luge was u a short, stout sled of hickory
built on the pattern of little girls' sleds in Canada." Hem-
ingway was characteristically lucid as he presented this new
sport and its technique.

You go down a long, steep stretch of road flanked by a
six hundred foot drop-off on the left and bordered by a
line of trees on the right. The sled goes fast from the start
and soon it is rushing faster than anything you have ever
felt. You are sitting, absolutely unsupported, only ten inches
above the ice and the road is feeding past you like a movie
film. The sled you are sitting on ... is rushing at motor car
speed towards a sharp curve. If you lean your body away
from the curve and drop the right foot the luge will swing
around the curve in a slither of ice and drop shooting down
the next slope. . . .

The dispatch, dealing with a variation of their own be-
loved winter sports, had an obvious appeal for Toronto-

130 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

nians. Hemingway outlined the hazards of big, slow-moving
hay and wood sleds along the run. "It is considered a very
bad omen to hit a wood sled," he wrote. The understated
humor provided a transition to his final four paragraphs
about the lugeing skill of the British colony at Bellaria, on
Lake Geneva. A long, single sentence paragraph was calcu-
lated to stir imperial pride in the most nationalistic Cana-
dians. "One wonderful sight is to see the ex-military gov-
ernor of Khartoum seated on a sled that looks about the size
of a postage stamp, his feet stuck straight out at the sides,
his hands in back of him, charging a smother of ice dust
down the steep, high-walled road, with his muffler straight
out behind him in the wind and a cherubic smile on his face
while all the street urchins of Montreux spread against the
walls and cheer him wildly as he passes."

The story had the energetic felicity Hemingway could
give to his journalism when he was absorbed by the material
or the sensation it aroused in him. His next article, one of
the three which appeared in the March 25th issue, had the
same vitality and freshness, here even better defined as he
turned again to Paris for the intimate, skeptical treatment
he always enjoyed writing. 14 His subject was the cosmo-
politan's thesis that the real Paris is thoroughly hidden from
casual tourists. There was neither obscurity nor padding in
his lead; it was the kind of effective feature writing that had
won him the European assignment.

After the cork has popped on the third bottle and the
jazz band has brayed the American suit and cloak buyer
into such a state of exaltation that he begins to sway slightly
with the glory of it all, he is liable to remark thickly and
profoundly: "So this is Paris!"

Hemingway pointed out the reality. "It is an artificial and
feverish Paris," he wrote, "operated at great profit for the

EUROPE 131

entertainment of the buyer and his like who are willing to
pay any prices for anything after a few drinks." His sen-
tences were thick with hostility. "The Buyer demands that
Paris be a super-Sodom and a grander-Gomorrah and once
alcohol loosens his strong racial grasp on his pocketbook
he is willing to pay for his ideal." Hemingway's contempt
which contained a good deal of puritanism was always
for the tourist rather than for those who cheated him. For
those who truly knew Paris, he maintained, there was a
completely different and authentic night life.

On gala nights there is a drummer at the Bal Musette,
but the accordion player wears a string of bells around his
ankle, and these, with the stamping of his boots as he sits
swaying on the dais above the dancing floor, give the accent
to the rhythm. The people that go to the Bal Musette do
not need the artificial stimulant of the jazz band to force
them to dance. They dance for the fun of it and they occa-
sionally hold someone up for the fun of it, and because it
is easy and exciting and pays well. Because they are young
and tough and enjoy life, without respecting it, they some-
times hit too hard, or shoot too quick, and then life becomes
a very grim matter with an upright machine that casts a
thin shadow and is called a guillotine at the end of it.

The syntax of the prose and the romanticism of the atti-
tude point to his debt to Kipling; the scene itself is an
outline of one of the first episodes in The Sun Also Rises.
Hemingway finished the article with another of the vi-
gnettes of action and dialogue. His eye and his imagination
were becoming increasingly engrossed with fictional pre-
sentation. It was still overwritten in spots, and some of the
phrases were merely the cliches of his material, but he made
the scene and the characters a vivid piece of melodrama.

132 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Occasionally the tourist does come in contact with the
real night life. Walking down the quiet hill along some
lonely street in a champagne haze about two o'clock in the
morning he sees a pair of hard faced kids come out of an
alley. They are nothing like the sleek people he has just
left. . . . Their closing in and a sudden, dreadful jar are all
that he remembers.

It is a chop back of the ear with a piece of lead pipe
wrapped in the Matin that does the trick and the tourist
has at last made contact with the real night life he has spent
so much money in seeking.

"Two hundred francs? The pig!" Jean says in the dark-
ness of the basement lit by the match which Georges struck
to look at the contents of the wallet.

"The Red Mill holds him up worse than we did, not so,
my old?"

"But yes. And he would have a headache to-morrow
morning anyway," says Jean. "Come on back to the Bal."

The second of his three stories in the issue of March 25
continued in a wholly different area his use of life in Paris. 15
In the only European dispatch he wrote dealing directly
with literature and one of the very few during his entire
apprenticeship in journalism he discussed Batouala, the
novel by Rene Maran which had just won the Goncourt
Prize. Although Hemingway made two interesting refer-
ences to the book's literary quality, he was approaching the
story as a feature writer rather than a critic or fellow artist.
He emphasized the newsworthy fact that Maran was a
Negro serving in Africa and at that moment ignorant of
the storm his book had caused in France. Then Hemingway
declared himself on the non-journalistic aspects of the novel.
It was "great art," he maintained, "except for the preface,
which is the only bit of propaganda in the book." His atti-
tude was a demonstration of his statement to Don Wright

EUROPE 133

the year before, in Chicago, that a writer had to see and
feel and taste his material.

Launched into the novel itself, the reader gets a picture
of African life in a native village seen by the big-whited
eyes, felt by the pink palms, and the broad, flat, naked feet
of the African native himself. You smell the smells of the
village, you eat its food, you see the white man as the black
man sees him, and after you have lived in the village you
die there. That is all there is to the story, but when you
have read it, you have been Batouala, and that means that
it is a great novel.

Hemingway's by-line had become a familiar one in the
Star Weekly during March. He deserved a momentary re-
lease from hack work. He was balked abruptly by a cable
from Toronto that sent him on his first specific assignment.
Anxious to get a coverage of the Genoa Economic Confer-
ence that would supplement the news agencies' stories, the
managing editor ordered him to Italy. On March 27th
Hemingway arrived in Genoa. He would at least have an
opportunity to take part in the backstage drama he had
previously been able to recount only at second-hand from
Paris press luncheons. He wrote and mailed one more article
before he left Paris, a loose, padded, editorial-like expose of
the myth of French politeness. 16 The Star Weekly used it
on April 15th, recognizing its editorial quality with a bold-
face, single line caption: FRENCH POLITENESS. Again the
synthetic paragraphs of contrived exposition were even-
tually balanced by a neat snatch of dialogue between him-
self and a guard at the Paris zoological gardens. The park,
Hemingway explained, was advertised as open to the pub-
lic from eleven until three.

"Is the reptile house closed?" I asked.
"Ferme!" the guard said.

134 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

"Why is it closed at this hour?" I asked.

"Ferme!" shouted the guard.

"Can you tell me when it will open?" I queried, still
polite.

The guard gave me a snarl and said nothing.

"Can you tell me when it will be open?" I asked again.

"What business is that of yours?" said the guard, and
slammed the door.

On this note Hemingway left Paris and went south to
Genoa. He was bound for a scene where he would find
inflationary prices, and where foreigners were ringed by
an aggrieved and militant nationalism. The ambiguities of
diplomacy, and the brutality of fascism, however, were at
any rate more rewarding material than the problems of
insolent French officials at the Jardin des Plantes and aggres-
sive Parisians on crowded buses.

The Genoa Economic Conference was in many ways the
most newsworthy of that rash of meetings by which states-
men contributed to the optimism of the 1920's. Its par-
ticular drama, as almost every commentator immediately
pointed out, lay in the fact that Europe was going to sit
down at a conference table together again. Germany was
to be received as an equal for the first time since the war.
Russia Red Russia herself would be admitted, on a very
limited basis, to be sure, but her mere presence was dramatic
and controversial. Canadian readers would find a material
interest in the efforts to reopen commercial relations be-
tween western Europe and the U.S.S.R. The blunt Amer-
ican refusal to attend the conference added a further note
of newsworthy tension. The meeting's obvious importance
to the political fortunes of Lloyd George supplied additional

EUROPE 135

Dominion concern. It was spot news. Hemingway's dis-
patches were used by the Daily Star rather than the Star
Weekly.

Five by-lined stories, four of them long and detailed,
were published between April 10 and April 24, 1922. For
the first time Hemingway cabled some of his material; on
April 10 and April 18 the Star gave his copyrighted articles
a secondary by-line, "Special Cable to The Star by a Staff
Correspondent." The other three stories he mailed to
Toronto in the customary way; underneath his by-line, as
on his Star Weekly features, appeared the label, "Special
Correspondence of The Star." It took at least two weeks
for the mail to reach Canada. The first story he wrote, on
March 27 several days before most of the press arrived
was not used until April 13. 17 The Star headed it with an
italicized introduction. The paragraph did more than re-
mind subscribers of the paper's overseas services to its
readers; it was also a timid editorial corrective to the out-
spoken anti-fascist tone of Hemingway's knowledgeable
dispatch.

Ernest M. Hemingway, a staff correspondent of The
Star, who has been traveling through Europe writing his
observations, is in Genoa to watch the progress of the con-
ference through Canadian eyes. In the following despatch
he describes the real danger of disorder resulting from the
presence of the Russian Soviet delegation.

In reality, however, Hemingway had been careful to
point out that the essential threat to civic peace was from
the Fascists. The well-documented point of view was more
authentic than the material being filed in this area by most
of his opposite numbers on the New York papers and the
wire services. The American press sent home the declara-
tion of Red menace their editors wanted. Hemingway, who

136 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

spoke Italian and knew the country and its people well,
gave a different picture. He did not take sides in a clumsily
partisan sense. His story was a realistic definition of the
actualities of Italian domestic politics. He hinted at the re-
ality ignored by most of the newspaper men; he explained,
straight-faced, that street clashes and riots normally involve
two opposing groups. He shifted with abrupt effectiveness
to an intimate, impressionistic treatment.

There is no doubt but that the Reds of Genoa and they
are about one-third of the population when they see the
Russian Reds, will be moved to tears, cheers, gesticulations,
offers of wine, liqueurs, bad cigars, parades, vivas, procla-
mations to one another and the wide world and other
kindred Italian symptoms of enthusiasm. There will also
be kissings on both cheeks, gatherings in cafes, toasts to
Lenine . . . and general shouts of, "Death to the Fascisti!"

That is the way that all Italian Red outbreaks start. Clos-
ing the cafes usually stops them . . . the "Vivas" grow softer
and less enthusiastic, the paraders put it off till another day,
and the Reds who reached the highest pitch of patriotism
too soon, roll under the tables of the cafes and sleep until
the bar-tender opens up in the morning.

Hemingway tellingly defined the fascist psychology.
"The fascisti make no distinction between socialists, com-
munists, republicans or members of co-operative societies.
They are all Reds and dangerous." His description of a
fascist counterattack was mocking and alert, and melancholy
in its prophecy of worse to come. He sketched the general
nature of the group. "The fascisti are young, tough, ardent,
intensely patriotic, generally good-looking with the youth-
ful beauty of the southern races, and firmly convinced that
they are in the right. They have an abundance of the valor
and the intolerance of youth."

EUROPE 137

As a dispatch reaching Toronto in a batch of conven-
tional wire service material, the story must have startled
his Toronto editors with the lucid, informed novelty of its
point of view. Good newspapermen, they couldn't deny its
professional virtues. It was more than well written. As a
piece of reporting it was one of the first realistic statements
about contemporary Italy. The fact that its author was
twenty-two made it more remarkable. It was one of Hem-
ingway's earliest anti-fascist enunciations, evidence of an
impressive personal growth since the 1918 days when he
was reacting to World War I in boyish, exclamatory de-
light; there was an equivalent artistic maturing in the prose
and narrative. The story, on the other hand, certainly
couldn't be cited as a dispatch seen "through Canadian
eyes/' as his paper was billing his Genoa coverage. Early
in the assignment, in fact, Hemingway received from his
home office what one of his Genoa colleagues later recalled
as severe criticism "for not covering some important Cana-
dian angle of the conference." He stayed in Genoa only
for the opening of the conclave, leaving town long before
the rest of the overseas press. His other articles were only
infrequently as skillful though a trifle more sensitive to
the Canadian point of view as his first one. On April 9 he
went out to Rapallo with a "flood of reporters" to inspect
and interrogate the Russian delegation. The Daily Star used
his story the next day on page one. 18

The dispatch was an uneven one, effective only when
he turned to paragraphs of description and personal re-
sponse. A mass interview, in an atmosphere as guarded as
Rapallo's, did not encourage impressionism. The bulk of
his relatively short cable dealt with the questions that were
put to Tchitcherin, one of the principal Soviet delegates.
Hemingway's boredom was evident in the careless dialogue.
He also missed the drama of the first interview of a Soviet
spokesman by the western press. Nor did he mention the

138 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

ambiguity noted in the New York Times, where the
late Edwin James recalled that Tchitcherin was a holdover
from the Czarist diplomatic corps. He omitted the irony
at that time a new one of a luxury hotel inhabited by
Bolsheviks. On the whole the story documents the verdict
of Wilbur Forrest, one of the New York Tribune's three
correspondents at the conference, who felt that Heming-
way's basic attitude toward his newspaper work was trans-
parently clear. "He didn't give a damn about it," according
to Forrest, "except that it provided some much needed
funds and gave him an association with other writers."

Much more interesting to Hemingway than the presence
of Lloyd George or Tchitcherin, in fact, was the arrival in
Genoa of Max Eastman. Eastman was covering the confer-
ence for the Liberator. Hemingway wasted no time in
showing the influential editor all the fiction he had with
him. He was already so serious about his creative writing
that he had brought with him from Paris, on a newspaper
assignment which promised to be laborious and important,
what Eastman later recalled as "a sheaf" of his own work.
This was the fiction he had been conscientiously writing in
Paris whenever he could get ahead of his Star Weekly
chore. Hemingway and Eastman, the latter once said,
"batted around Genoa together quite a lot." When East-
man and George Slocombe of the London Daily Herald
drove out to Rapallo to visit Max Beerbohm, the young
correspondent went with them. Eastman felt their joint
conversation was worth making some notes on during the
ride back to Genoa. Hemingway, however, smiled and
made a revealing gesture and remark. He tapped his fore-
head and said, "I have every word of it in here." Eastman
concluded, on the basis of "the extraordinary realism" of
Hemingway's subsequent work, that the statement was
literally true.

In the meantime they had attended the opening session

EUROPE 139

of the conference on April 10. Hemingway filed two stories
which were mailed to Toronto and used on pages one and
two of the April 24 issue. His response to the initial excite-
ment was enough to make the first one a lively, detailed
account of the scene in the Palazzo di San Giorgio. 10 His
tone, as he resigned himself to his Canadian obligations, was
mocking and cynical. He explained that the hall was "about
half the size of Massey Hall/' in Toronto; a few paragraphs
later he described the chandelier globes as being u as big as
association footballs." His skeptical eye did not miss a
plaque which honored Machiavelli. Although his colleagues
from New York were soon writing of the conference as
"a distinct success" and of "the temper of all the delegates"
as "excellent and favorable to hard work," Hemingway
preferred to linger over the appropriateness of this earlier
Italian politician to the contemporary scene. "Machiavelli,"
he pointed out, "in his day, wrote a book that could be
used as a textbook by all conferences, and, from all results,
is diligently studied." He found a marble statue of Colum-
bus "rather pompous," and he was even less impressed by
the diplomats themselves.

Delegates begin to come into the hall in groups. They
cannot find their places at the table, and stand talking. The
rows of camp chairs that are to hold the invited guests be-
gin to be filled with top-hatted, white mustached senators
and women in Paris hats and wonderful, wealth-reeking fur
coats. The fur coats are the most beautiful things in the
hall.

The Star certainly could not complain that his material
duplicated its wire service or Chicago Daily News dis-
patches. He mentioned his friend Eastman, who sat behind
him "like a big, jolly, middle-western college professor."
He described the head of the Canadian delegation, Sir

140 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Charles Blair Gordon, as "a little ill at ease," and cited the
British delegation, derisively, as "the best dressed." His
paragraphs began to have the exuberant excess of his high
school journalism; he wrote that Joseph Wirth, Chancellor
of Germany and head of its Genoa delegation, "looks like
the tuba player in a German band." He caught the dramatic
moment when all the chairs were suddenly filled save those
of the Russian representatives. "[They] are the four empti-
est looking chairs I have ever seen."

Hemingway also stomached the opening day speeches.
His second dispatch of April 10 concerned a late, defiant
statement on disarmament by Tchitcherin. 20 Hemingway,
one of the few newspapermen still in the hall believing,
he wrote, "in seeing a game through until the last man is
out in the ninth inning" gave a graphic account of the
explosion. He handled the narrative skillfully, introducing
suspense in the first paragraph, prolonging it through care-
ful, successive passages, and then, midway through the long
story, he reached his well-organized climax.

Tchitcherin rose and his hands shaking spoke in French,
in his queer, hissing accents, the result of an accident that
knocked out half his teeth. The interpreter with the ring-
ing voice translated. There was not a sound in the pauses
except the clink of the mass of decorations on an Italian
general's chest as he shifted from one foot to another. It is
an actual fact. You could hear the faint metallic clink of
the hanging decorations.

Hemingway remained in Genoa another week. He sent
out only one more story, a one-paragraph cable on April
18, his contribution to the diplomatic alarm which followed
the signing of a treaty, out at Rapallo, between Russia and
Germany. 21 He departed on this final note of disillusion,
his career as a Canadian foreign correspondent temporarily

EUROPE 141

suspended. He had profited materially from the Genoa as-
signment, in terms of story payment and expense money,
and he had met Eastman and Beerbohm. His journalistic
dossier, if not his reputation within the guild, was more
professional; he had covered a major diplomatic conference
for a metropolitan paper. His equipment as a writer had
not been enriched, although the experience had obvious
connections with his general mood of political disenchant-
ment. As a reluctant newspaperman his most effective
metier and, in retrospect, the most artistically valuable
form was still the subjective feature story in any area
chosen by himself because of his own response to it.

IV.

During the late spring and early summer of 1922, as
additional financing for a summer of travel and creative
work, Hemingway mailed four articles to Toronto on the
casual basis of his original free lance understanding with
the Star. In May, after a day's trout fishing along the Rhone
Canal, near Aigle in Switzerland, he wrote an impression-
istic, full-column story whose over-all effect was as power-
ful as anything he had yet done. 22 The eight paragraphs
a little less than a thousand words were in the diction and
tone of similar passages in the short story he wrote in 1925,
"Big Two-Hearted River," and in the novel he began that
same year, The Sun Also Rises. Lacking, naturally, the taut,
frequently rewritten sheen of his fiction, the article was
nevertheless visual and evocative. u ln the afternoon," he
began, "a breeze blows up the Rhone valley from Lake
Geneva. Then you fish up-stream with the breeze at your
back, the sun on the back of your neck, the tall white
mountains on both sides of the green valley and the fly
dropping very fine and far off on the surface and under

142 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

the edge of the banks of the little stream . . . that is barely
a yard wide, and flows swift and still."

Hemingway and his wife hiked over the St. Bernard
Pass and down into Milan from Aosta. On June 24 a pair
of his articles were published in Toronto, one in the Daily
Star and the other in the Star Weekly the twenty-fourth
was a Saturday which completed the examination of fas-
cism he had begun in the Genoa dispatch of March 27. 23
Some of the material was a rehash of the earlier article,
newly dramatized, however, by the first of two interviews
Hemingway had with Mussolini in 1922. 24 "Mussolini,"
Hemingway wrote, "is a big, brown-faced man with a high
forehead, a slow-smiling mouth, and large, expressive hands.
. . . His face is intellectual, it is the typical 'Bersagliere' face,
with its large, brown, oval shape, dark eyes and big, slow-
speaking mouth." The interview was competent and in-
formed. It particularly impressed John Bone, the Star's
managing editor; when Hemingway returned to Toronto
the next year, in 1923, Bone planned to assign him primarily
to interviewing celebrities. 25

The portrait of Mussolini, however, was only a partial
one at most. The interview also had some of the easy glib-
ness which thoroughly dominated a Paris dispatch he
wrote in late July. 20 The first phase of Hemingway's Euro-
pean feature work for the Star Weekly, begun in February,
1922, intensified in March, interrupted by the Genoa as-
signment in April, and resumed briefly in May and June,
now sputtered to a momentary halt. Hemingway's frivolous
story about the great aperitif scandal re-emphasized what
his six months' production had already indicated. He had
virtually completed his apprenticeship. Journalism had com-
pleted the process of becoming a writer. Leisure, and soli-
tary, rejected experimentation would now make him a
fictionalist. Had he continued to write feature stories for
the remaining six months of 1922 or, indeed, for the rest

EUROPE 143

of his life they would have been written, like this August
12 article, tongue in cheek, to pay the rent and finance new
travel. "The great aperitif scandal that is agitating Paris,"
he wrote in his lead, "has struck at the roots of one of the
best loved institutions of France." He explained Gallic
drinking habits, spinning out the commonplace exposition
with a wordy anecdote about the celebration of Bastile
Day. He turned with relief to his own work.

The months as a free-lance contributor and part-time
foreign correspondent had permitted him and his wife to
live in Europe. They had provided modest financing for a
few months of serious writing, and, above all, they had
provided an invaluable reservoir of observed and experi-
enced material. The qualities that give stature and immedi-
acy to Hemingway's early short stories of 1924 and 1925
selectivity, precision, uncompromising economy, deep
emotional clarification were never dominant in his jour-
nalism of this period. Each one of those characteristics was
separately present in every article; sometimes there were
paragraphs or entire sections which contained them all. The
shaping of them into a single instrument that would domi-
nate each piece of writing came only when he could
concentrate without interruption on work he regarded as
dignified and worthy. His position would remain a para-
doxical and exasperating one as long as he continued in a
role for which he had the capacity but not the tempera-
ment, and which he therefore regarded with increasing
cynicism.

Other newspapermen liked him personally and respected
a talent they sometimes recognized even then as exceptional.
"He was an erratic and obviously brilliant young man,"
according to Basil Woon, a Hearst correspondent in Paris
in 1922 who saw a good deal of Hemingway both socially
and, later that year, professionally. Many of them sensed
that he was an alien in their world; that was part of what

144 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Woon meant by erratic. Trying to define the impression
Hemingway made in 1922, Wilbur Forrest said many years
later that he would have prophesied a career as "an artist
painter instead of a famous novelist." Forrest remembered
with impersonal distaste that Hemingway "lived in the
Paris Latin Quarter and was among artists, a hanger-on at
the Dome and Rotonde sidewalk cafes." Forrest thought
of him as "some sort of genius in a garret." Hemingway
himself, of course as his Star Weekly indictment of Paris
bohemians demonstrated had nothing but contempt for
the kind of life Forrest automatically assigned him. Momen-
tarily liberated from hack work, Hemingway began in the
summer of 1922 to build in the little magazines and in the
literary associations of Paris the foundations of his future.

CHAPTER
VII

PARIS

"Gertrude was always right."

ERNEST HEMINGWAY!

In terms of its actual contribution to the final body of
his creative work, 1922 was not a productive year for
Hemingway. Although he told Anderson in May that he
had "been working like hell at writing," 2 very little of the
material of these months survived. Some of the verse he
wrote was published the next year in Poetry and the Little
Review, and he continued work on a novel which was
never published. A large part of his time, however, was
necessarily given to newspaper work, despite his anxiety to
be free of it, and he spent many weeks traveling, in Spain,
in Switzerland, in Italy, and in Germany.

It was in these terms that the year was of primary profit
to him. He was able to write effectively about northern
Michigan because in 1919 and 1920 he had both renewed
old associations with it and simultaneously seen it from
fresh perspectives. His mastery of the European material
came from the same kind of saturation in the atmosphere
at several stages in his personal and artistic development. Of
the fifteen stories in In Our Time, five dealt specifically
with expatriation; they were the fruit of his European en-
counters and observation in 1922, 1923, and 1924. 3 This
same intimacy with Europe would give authenticity of
atmosphere to The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms.

146 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

From his expatriation there also emerged all the less tangible
assets that come to a responsive young man exposed to the
contrasts of a culture that is not his own but which illumi-
nates the one he has temporarily abandoned. There was
instruction to be absorbed not only from the newspaper
work and from the countries and their people, but also
from the literary associations that had been non-existent or
abortive in Toronto and Chicago. Anderson's letters of in-
troduction provided the immediate entree. Hemingway's
charm and intensity extended the introductions into friend-
ships.

"Gertrude Stein and me," Hemingway wrote to Ander-
son in March, 1922, three months after reaching Europe,
"are just like brothers, and we see a lot of her." 4 Miss Stein
was equally pleased with Hemingway; she told Anderson
that she and Alice Toklas were having "a good time" with
the Hemingways and hoped "to see more of them." 5 Hem-
ingway had also met James Joyce and read part of Ulysses.
Ezra Pound had become both literary sponsor among the
little magazines and sparring partner at the gym. He sent
six of Hemingway's poems to Scofield Thayer at the Dial,
and "took" a story for the Little Review. Hemingway's
greatest admiration, however, was for Anderson's good
friend in the apartment at 27, rue de Fleurus. "We love
Gertrude Stein," Hemingway scrawled in pencil at the end
of the letter to Anderson.

Gertrude Stein herself recalled the appearance of Hem-
ingway as "the first thing that happened" when she and
Alice Toklas returned to Paris in 1922 from Saint-Remy. 6
She remembered him as "an extraordinarily good-looking
young man." His eyes, she felt, writing ten years later,
when their friendship had become sour and bitter, were
passionately interested rather than interesting, and he "sat
in front of Gertrude Stein and listened and looked." Soon
he began to talk, and they talked a great deal together, and

PARIS 147

Hemingway invited her and Miss Toklas to the apartment
he and his wife had taken near the place du Tertre. That
night Miss Stein read everything he had written up to that
point. She did more than read it; she "went over" it. She
rather liked the poems, but found the unfinished novel
wanting. "There is a great deal of description in this," she
told Hemingway, "and not particularly good description.
Begin over again and concentrate."

It was as good advice as he would ever get. His talent
was substantial, as his newspaper work showed; like most
young writers he was largely content to exercise and ex-
tend the talent. That writing could be a laborious and
exacting process had not previously occurred to Heming-
way. He had worked hard, it was true, precociously hard,
during those compulsive months in Michigan in 1919 and
in Chicago and Toronto during the following two years.
He had withstood frustration and rejection, but the con-
ception of writing as concentration, as heavy, aching effort,
was essentially a new one. Certainly he had never heard
such doctrine from Anderson, the only writer of any stature
with whom he had been in close contact. Hemingway,
indeed, had mistrusted Anderson's apparent indifference to
technical concerns.

The fact that this was a misconception on Hemingway's
part, which subsequent critics shared with him, did not
alter the illusion's effect on his susceptibility to new and
seemingly different influences. In his conversation, as, later,
in his memoirs and reminiscences, Anderson enjoyed posing
as a virtually automatic writer, one to whom his art was
merely natural storytelling. Actually, of course, as the
manuscripts of Winesburg, Ohio show, Anderson's stories
frequently went through a series of complicated revisions. 7
He successfully presented himself, however, as the roman-
tic artist of instinctive creativity. To this he added what
were for Hemingway the distasteful affectations of bo-

148 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

hemianism. It becomes wholly natural, therefore, that
Hemingway should have graduated so readily to Gertrude
Stein who herself, on the other hand, had the greatest
admiration for Anderson's work and should ultimately
disavow Anderson with The Torrents of Spring.

In 1922, however, Anderson was as much of a literary
model and influence as had yet existed actively in Heming-
way's experience. He had absorbed from the older man
more than most commentators were subsequently willing to
allow. Hemingway not only listened carefully to Ander-
son's ideas in Chicago in the winter of 1920 and the spring
of 1921, but also eagerly read what Anderson had pub-
lished. As late as the fall of 1923 Hemingway discussed
Anderson's work extensively with Morley Callaghan, the
Canadian newspaperman and writer, with sympathy and
understanding. Hemingway shared with Anderson an in-
sistence on sex as a basic human drive. Like Anderson,
Hemingway was drawn to the examination of youth and its
distresses. They also shared a sense of the importance of
emotion and feeling. "Turning her face to the wall," An-
derson had written of one of his early characters, "[she]
began trying to force herself to face bravely the fact that
many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg."
This is a recurrent theme in Hemingway, altered and made
peculiarly his own by his insistence that the process is al-
ways aggravated and controlled by the requirements of a
fixed decorum. Even after their separation in December,
1921, when Hemingway left Chicago for Europe, Ander-
son remained an important factor in Hemingway's posi-
tion. It was to Anderson that he wrote from abroad in the
late winter and early spring of 1922, discussing his work
and his ambitions; during these first months in Europe he
also talked constantly about Anderson.

Hemingway lunched frequently in Paris that year with
Frank Mason, the local correspondent for Hearst's Inter-

PARIS 149

national News Service. 8 Mason was himself mildly inter-
ested in serious writing. Their luncheons, however, in-
variably included a third writer. The late Guy Hickok
was for many years the Brooklyn Eagle's European cor-
respondent. 9 He was a reporter of considerable experi-
ence, an excellent journalist, and a thoughtful, imaginative
man. The conversations at these luncheons invariably con-
centrated on writing. Mason's most positive memory of
Hemingway's interests during those first months of 1922
was that he spoke repeatedly of Sherwood Anderson, and,
more specifically, that he expressed many times his intention
to model his own literary career on Anderson's. Three
years later Hemingway told Scott Fitzgerald that his first
pattern had been Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. The evi-
dence of two short stories Hemingway wrote before he
could have fully grasped Miss Stein's teaching confirms
this. Both "Up in Michigan" and "My Old Man" were
written earlier than the rest of the stories published in 1925
in In Our Time. They can be fairly described as Ander-
sonian. There were those who even accused Hemingway of
having virtually plagiarized "My Old Man" from Ander-
son.

This was an absurd charge, but certainly such derivation
of treatment as the stories indicate is from Anderson as
much as from Stein. The treatment of sex in "Up in Michi-
gan," violent, painful, and equated with naturalness and
virtue, is wholly Andersonian. The language and narrative
device of "My Old Man," as well as the material and point
of view, are similarly reminiscent. Neither of the stories
was dependent on Anderson's work in any compulsive or
unhealthy way. Hemingway himself, when he learned of
the accusations against "My Old Man," attempted certain
distinctions between his own work and the older man's. He
told Edmund Wilson that he didn't think "My Old Man"
stemmed from Anderson at all, because, he said, "It is about

ISO ERNEST HEMINGWAY

a boy and his father and race-horses. Sherwood," Heming-
way explained, "has written about boys and horses. But
very differently. It derives from boys and horses. Ander-
son derives from boys and horses. I don't think they're [the
stories] anything alike." 10 Hemingway was positive about
one thing. "I know I wasn't inspired by him." Even the
idiom of Hemingway's letter to Wilson, written in No-
vember, 1923, is now that of Stein rather than of Anderson,
particularly in the last lines.

I know him [Anderson] pretty well but have not seen
him for several years. His work seems to have gone to hell,
perhaps from people in New York telling him too much
how good he was. Functions of criticism. I am very fond
of him. He has written good stories.

Hemingway's debt to Anderson continued to be both
personal and artistic. Frank Mason recalled Hemingway's
admiration for Anderson as being centered on the life An-
derson led as much as on the work he produced, and on
his attitudes as a writer as much as on his treatment of ma-
terial. The Hearst correspondent, who never cared par-
ticularly for Hemingway, also had the impression that the
younger writer had been struck by Anderson's gift for
publicity and the exploitation of his personality. Heming-
way's relationship to Gertrude Stein was very different
than this.

77.

The association between Hemingway and Miss Stein was
foreshadowed, in a sense, even before they had either met
or heard of one another. Hemingway's newspaper work
had already indicated a characteristic which has remained
basic to his temperament. He was always intensely inter-
ested in how to do a thing. He was absorbed by method.

PARIS 151

Thus he had written in Toronto in 1920 a detailed discus-
sion of how to catch trout bait, how to fix the bait on the
hook, how to then locate the trout themselves; he wrote
articles in 1921 about how bootlegging operated and how
American gunmen worked, and, in 1922, how to handle a
Swiss luge. This was one of his primary attitudes toward
experience. It was fundamental to his interest in war, poli-
tics, and sport. He would put some of this into his descrip-
tion of young Krebs, who in "Soldier's Home" sits on the
porch reading a book about the war. "It was a history,"
Hemingway wrote, "and he was reading about all the en-
gagements he had been in. It was the most interesting read-
ing he had ever done. He wished there were more maps. . . .
Now he was really learning about the war."

The same zealous concern with method is explicit in
Hemingway's reaction to bullfighting, big game hunting,
and the subtleties of guerrilla war. Once he even wrote in
Esquire a precise explication of how to drive an automobile
in a heavy snow storm. This concern with method gave to
his journalism, as it would to his fiction, a vast air of
knowledgeability. The concern was thoroughly genuine.
Originally encouraged by the cool lucidity of his father, it
was extended by his own instinctive curiosity and enriched
by the exacting skepticism of such tutors as Pete Welling-
ton, Lionel Moise, and, later in 1922, William Bolitho, the
South African journalist. In terms of his serious writing, the
aspect of his life, after all, with which he was most deeply
concerned, it was only natural that he should be looking
for some orderly method.

He had found the beginnings of such a method in the
style book in Kansas City, and in the counsel of the Star's
editors. He was discovering other fluencies and effects
through his feature stories for the Star Weekly. Sherwood
Anderson, of course, offered no precise methodology.
What one got from him were thematic attitudes and an

152 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

integrity of vision. Gertrude Stein, however, was im-
mensely concerned with method, both in her own work
and in what she was writing and saying about prose. Hem-
ingway acknowledged his debt to her technique very
specifically in 1923. "Her method," he told Edmund Wil-
son, "is invaluable for analyzing anything or making notes
on a person or a place." 11 The method itself, or at least that
part of it to which Hemingway responded between 1922
and 1924, the period of Miss Stein's greatest personal im-
portance to him, revolved principally around the arrange-
ment and exploitation of specific kinds of words to repre-
sent and emphasize a desired effect.

"The question of repetition," Gertrude Stein said later,
"is very important." 12 This was definite and tangible. How
she herself had done it Hemingway could discover in her
Three Lives; he could also find it, at a more involved level,
in the volume she had just finished. "This Making of Amer-
icans book of Gertrude Stem's," he wrote Anderson in
May, 1922, "is a wonderful one." 13 His own work began
to reflect the method. It was particularly apparent in "Up
in Michigan," which can be regarded as a transition piece;
the story is a blend, in a very loose way, of his joint obliga-
tion to Anderson and Stein. The third paragraph of "Up in
Michigan" "I had this conception of the whole para-
graph," Miss Stein once said 14 is wholly a use of repetition
for emphasis and clarification.

Liz liked Jim very much. She liked it the way he walked
over from the shop and often went to the kitchen door to
watch for him to start down the road. She liked it about
his mustache. She liked it about how white his teeth were
when he smiled. She liked it very much that he didn't look
like a blacksmith. She liked it how much D. J. Smith and
Mrs. Smith liked Jim. One day she found that she liked it
the way the hair was black on his arms and how white they

PARIS 153

were above the tanned line when he washed up in the
washbasin outside the house. Liking that made her feel
funny.

The paragraph illustrates what Miss Stein had in mind
when she later described Hemingway as "such a good
pupil." 15 Hemingway, as part of his apprenticeship, per-
formed an invaluable exercise through which he studied her
method in the most intense way. He copied the manuscript
of The Making of Americans for her, getting it ready for
the publisher whom he swore he would find for it, and
then he corrected the proofs. Correcting proofs, Gertrude
Stein felt, was like dusting. "You learn the values of the
thing," she said, "as no reading suffices to teach it to you." 18
The way Hemingway used the word "liked" in the para-
graph from "Up in Michigan" indicated what he had
learned.

Hemingway's first use of the lesson was entirely conven-
tional. "Liz liked Jim very much." Here, in the lead sen-
tence, it says no more than one says casually about a dozen
people each day. Then, by repetition, Hemingway
strengthened and qualified it. He showed the variety and
sensation of her liking. He displayed its immediacy. This
was the quality Gertrude Stein had attempted to imbed in
The Making of Americans. Hemingway also indicated his
grasp of her declaration that the twentieth century was not
interested in events. Midway through the paragraph, as
his tutor herself did constantly, he gave the repetition a
new element by using "like" as a different part of speech.
Finally, as the paragraph ended, Hemingway conceived
another variation, again an echo of Miss Stein's own sus-
ceptibility to it. This was "liking," the gerund. "Liking
that," Hemingway wrote, "made her feel funny." The
paragraph, above all, had been sprung from a previous use
of the verb in the story's opening lines. "He liked her face,"

154 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Hemingway had said of Jim Gilmore, "because it was so
jolly but he never thought about her." The way in which
Liz liked him, however, was shown to the reader to be very
different.

Later, of course, Miss Stein became waspish about this
sort of thing. "It is so flattering," she wrote of Hemingway
in 1933, "to have a pupil who does it without understanding
it." 17 She was indulging in her own variety of sour grapes.
The paragraph from "Up in Michigan" refutes her belittle-
ment. Sometimes, to be sure, Hemingway mishandled the
method. It was a slippery technique, deceptively simple.
His use of the verb "found" in the seventh sentence, al-
though it had a value of precision, was clumsy and over-
studious, Steinian in an awkward sense. There were also
more serious aberrations of the method. "Mr. and Mrs.
Elliot," Hemingway began the story of that name in 1924,
"tried very hard to have a baby. They tried as often as
Mrs. Elliot could stand it. They tried in Boston after they
were married and they tried coming over on the boat. They
did not try very often on the boat because Mrs. Elliot was
quite sick." 18 Like an ugly caricature of the method, the
line runs through the entire story. The repetition, smart
and glib, did not qualify and enlarge the word and its
representation. It was being used for effect in its most
limited sense. The method had to be more than a trick; it
was not designed for the aggrandizement of cafe wit.

His debt to Miss Stein, clearly, went beyond such ele-
mentary conceptions as this. She helped him discover not
only what he was seeing, and how to communicate the
sight, but what to look for. It was she who explained that
he must look at his material, and at each new experience,
as certain painters Cezanne, in particular looked at their
own compositions. His own subsequent dictums on writing
are often variations and extensions of what she had either
told him or helped him to learn. He went beyond her as a

PARIS 155

writer in the same proportion that he was able to enrich
her method by giving it a practical, muscular program of
training; the program supplemented the fact that unlike
Miss Stein, as critics subsequently observed, Hemingway
had something to write about. He told a young writer who
came to him for advice in 1935, and to whom he gave not
only counsel but also a job as night watchman on his boat,
that he should watch what happened when they went fish-
ing. "Remember what the noises were," Hemingway told
him, "and what was said. Find what gave you the emotion;
what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then
write it down," he instructed his pupil, as Miss Stein, less
specifically, had instructed him, "making it clear so the
reader will see it too and have the same feeling that you
had." 19

Hemingway then described the whole process of an ap-
prenticeship with a phrase from the arduous months he had
put into musical training as a boy in Oak Park. "That's a
five finger exercise," he told the young writer. He also told
him to do precisely what Gertrude Stein had attempted in
The Making of Americans, in which, she said, she wanted
"to make a description of every kind of human being until
I could know by these variations how everybody was to be
known." 20 In 1935 Hemingway rearranged the precept, as
he did most of what he heard from Miss Stein, to give it a
more available form. "Then," he continued to the young
writer, "get in somebody else's head for a change. If I bawl
you out try to figure what I'm thinking about as well as
how you feel about it." Hemingway stated a principle
which has permitted him to survive all the fluctuations of
literary fashions. "As a man," he explained, "things are as
they should or shouldn't be. As a man you know who is
right and who is wrong. You have to make decisions and
enforce them. As a writer you should not judge. You
should understand."

156 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Hemingway was a good teacher because he had learned
these things for himself, taking a method and a handful of
rather arbitrary enunciations and shaping them to his needs,
material, and objectives. Whatever he said about writing he
knew to be true, for him, because he knew it worked. He
knew how it was done. Hemingway had built in the interval
between 1922 and 1935 an elaborate codification upon the
blueprint Miss Stein had given him. He had taken it beyond
anything she could do with it, and for this, of course, she
could not forgive him. He himself always acknowledged
his obligation with frankness. The greatest tribute he paid
her was made in 1924, in a letter to her discussing the work
he was doing. "[Writing]," he said, "used to be easy be-
fore I met you." 21 He had always been willing anxious,
indeed to work hard at his writing, but she had helped
show him how to make it profitably hard. This became one
of his fundamental beliefs. This was his attitude in 1935,
toward his own apprentice, whose work, Hemingway
found, was at first abominable. "Still, I thought, many other
people write badly at the start and this boy is so extremely
serious that he must have something; real seriousness in re-
gard to writing being one of the two absolute necessities." 22

Hemingway's relationship with Gertrude Stein has been
interpreted in several ways. On the whole the definitions
have fallen into one of two extremes. The early critical
commentary saw him as a complete disciple. In this it fol-
lowed the line Miss Stein laid down in 1933, when she said,
speaking of the influence of herself and Anderson on Hem-
ingway, that he "had been formed by the two of them." 23
Later it became fashionable to disparage his debt to her.
This occurred in part because few critics have been willing
to study what she was doing in her own work. It has been
easier to study Hemingway. He himself, as has been so fre-
quently the case during his career, gave a more realistic
and verifiable account of the debt and its variety of dis-

PARIS 157

tortion. Speaking of his obligation to both Stein and Pound,
he said in 1951 that "they were both very kind to me and I
always said so." He related this to the literary commenta-
tors who are both too eager for and too wary of literary
influences. "This," he went on, "is regarded in critical
circles like pleading guilty at a court martial." He remem-
bered that she had told him that he "might be a good
writer of some new kind." She also reminded him that
"no classic resembled any previous classic."

This sort of instruction was available from various Paris
sources for any young man as serious about writing as
Hemingway. The burden of later identification, however,
falls most heavily upon Miss Stein as the source. She was a
better instructor than most writers, both by temperament
and situation. She was not at least during the beginning
oppressively the teacher. She could stimulate as well as
lecture. She enjoyed instruction without overprizing it.
Her salon had the effect of a classroom, but it lacked the
trappings. Hemingway was still of an age in which he
could respond to her as he had responded a few years
earlier to Margaret Dixon and Fannie Biggs. He was anx-
ious, above all, to be a pupil.

Miss Stein's instruction, though it was generally given
verbally, survives for our scrutiny in her own work. It is
itself a clarification of the lessons Hemingway was receiving
and the exercises he was performing. The direction of his
writing, and his evolution from journalist to writer, is il-
luminated by the steps she had already taken and the
statements she would subsequently make. She talked con-
stantly about landscape in writing, and tried to communi-
cate it through her prose. In August, 1924, Hemingway
wrote her about a story he had just finished, "the long one
I worked on before I went to Spain where I'm trying to do
the country like Cezanne. . . ," 24 Each phrase of the letter's
sentences contained implicit citation of the tutorials he had

158 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

attended. "It's about 100 pages long," he continued, "and
nothing happens and the country is swell, I made it all up,
so I see it all. ..." Miss Stein had been emphatic in her
insistence that a writer must create rather than merely re-
port. Hemingway was following the advice, in the compo-
sition of "Big Two-Hearted River," and sharing with her
the results of the instruction.

During the first three years of their friendship, from
1922 through 1924, Hemingway relied heavily, in a general
way, on her judgment. Their relationship was never in any
sense a collaboration, but he showed her his work and
trusted her evaluation. When Robert McAlmon asked him
in 1924 for a contribution to the forthcoming Contact Col-
lection of Contemporary Writers, Hemingway rather diffi-
dently sent him "Soldier's Home," adding that Miss Stein
had read it and liked it. Earlier, when he and McAlmon
were readying Hemingway's Three Stories & Ten Poems
in 1923, Hemingway took the proofs and cover to Miss
Stein before sending them back to McAlmon. During the
first months of their association, in 1922, Hemingway ap-
parently even typed out samples of his early journalism for
her; among her papers is a typescript of an article which
had been printed in the Star Weekly early in 1921, a year
before he met her.

Miss Stein, however, was not optimistic about the in-
definite extent of journalism's contribution to an appren-
ticeship. She felt that in addition to encouraging a writer to
report rather than make, newspaper work also weakened
him through its reliance on artificial supports. "News-
papers," she said later, as she had often explained in earlier
conversations, "want to do something, they want to tell
what is happening as if it were just then happening." 25 She
easily persuaded Hemingway that such journalistic imme-
diacy was not a genuine immediacy. It was a primer lesson
which Hemingway knew more intimately than she; her

PARIS 159

conclusions were painfully clear to him. She was very
specific in her declaration that Hemingway should stop
being a newspaperman. After reading the stories he had
written before he reached Paris, Hemingway remembered
thirty years later, she advised him "to get out of journalism
and write as she said that the one would use up the juice I
needed for the other. She was quite right," Hemingway
said in 1951, "and that was the best advice she gave me."

Despite Miss Stein's injunction, and his own anxiety, to
abandon journalism, Hemingway was still economically
bound to newspaper work in 1922. In terms of his educa-
tion, of course, thinking still of Europe as the school in
which he matured, there still remained some profit to be
drawn from journalism, both as it provided a vehicle for
constant writing and as it enlarged the range of his experi-
ence. In the late summer of 1922, therefore, Hemingway
resumed both his travels and his journalism. The one could
not exist without the other. Back in Paris in August, after a
long walking tour in Italy with his wife and an English
friend, the Hemingways set out again. This time they were
accompanied on part of the trip by another American
newspaperman, Bill Bird, and his wife. 26

The final form in which Hemingway's journalistic treat-
ment of this German trip emerged was in some respects
different from the earlier pattern of his European corre-
spondence in 1922. It was the first genuine series of articles
he delivered. The series also had a new publication history.
He mailed seven articles to Toronto from Germany be-
tween August 17 and the first few days of September; with
the exception of one of the last stories, they were all
printed in the Daily Star, rather than, as before, in the
Star Weekly. The trip was undertaken, however, without

160 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

any specific instructions from his managing editor. The
articles were written to cover the expenses and, if possible,
to put him a little ahead again financially. The fact that
they were used by the Daily Star indicates that John Bone
had been impressed by his Star Weekly feature work
particularly, one imagines, by the most recent dispatches,
those from Italy and that he was now thoroughly con-
scious of Hemingway as a member of his staff.

The stories from the Black Forest, however, could not
have caused Bone to think of Hemingway as anything
more than a briskly entertaining writer whose greatest
virtue was that he happened to be in Europe and under
loose contract to the Star. As a group, relatively speaking,
the articles were hasty and indifferent, written out of the
same approach that had dominated the more commonplace
of the Star Weekly stories Hemingway had already written
both in Europe and in Canada. There was as yet little
evidence that Hemingway was reacting to Miss Stein's
tutoring. Some of the journalism he wrote later in 1922,
when he covered the Greco-Turk fighting, and the work
he did for Bone in the spring of 1923, when he was sent to
the Ruhr, demonstrate a professional advance. Actually,
although Hemingway saw a good deal of Gertrude Stein
in the spring and summer of 1922, their most profitable
association came at the end of that year and the beginning
of the next. "I am going to chuck journalism I think," he
wrote her from Toronto in November, 1923. "You ruined
me as a journalist last winter. Have been no good since." 27
In August, 1922, however, his writing, insofar as his news-
paper work is an accurate index, was comparatively pedes-
trian. He was still content with his natural facility and the
tricks he had now acquired through experience and through
his new intimacy with experienced correspondents. That
the trip was exciting and instructive there can be no doubt;
the articles reflect his response to the new scene, even if on

PARIS 161

the whole they don't communicate the response in a
memorable way.

The most interesting element, therefore, becomes the
fact that he never used this material in his fiction. To this
extent it contributed to his increasing dissatisfaction with
newspaper work. He discovered again that, for him, ma-
terial which he used hastily for feature work was virtually
useless to him for his own work. "On a newspaper," he ex-
plained later, "... you have to sponge your memory clean
like a slate every day." Foreign correspondence differed
from this only in degree. Although one did not write for
quite the same oppressive deadlines, he nevertheless had to
write before he had really absorbed the experience, and,
in feature writing, enough of the emotion had to be written
into so that the material was muddied for future use.

"In newspaper work," Hemingway declared in 1952, ex-
panding his interpretation of working on the Kansas City
Star, "you have to learn to forget every day what happened
the day before . . . newspaper work is valuable up until the
point that it forcibly begins to destroy your memory. A
writer must leave it before that point." There was also an-
other destructive ingredient in journalism. "In writing for
a newspaper," Hemingway once maintained rephrasing,
as he did so often, a dictum of Miss Stein "you told what
happened and, with one trick and another, you communi-
cated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which
gives a certain emotion to any account of something that
has happened on that day." 28

Thus the only two German articles which possessed real
quality were a pair which Hemingway did not write im-
mediately after experiencing the material. The first was
mailed from Strasbourg on August 23. 20 It had been pre-
ceded by three earlier stories, datelined from the small
Black Forest towns through which they were hiking. The
Strasbourg article, however, dealt with the plane trip which

162 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

had first brought them from Paris to Germany. Commer-
cial flying was still an adventure in 1922, particularly in
terms of its dramatic swiftness. "The trip is ten hours and
a half by best express train," Hemingway pointed out, "and
takes two hours and a half by plane." His exposition was
precise and visual, even its sentence structure reflecting his
concern with the experience he was recording.

Our suitcase was stowed aboard under a seat beside the
pilot's place. We climbed up a couple of steps into a stuffy
little cabin and the mechanic handed us some cotton for our
ears and locked the door. The pilot climbed into his seat
back of the enclosed cock-pit where we sat, a mechanic
pulled down on the propeller and the engine began to roar.
I looked around at the pilot. He was a short little man, his
cap backwards on his head, wearing an oil stained sheep-
skin coat and big gloves. Then the plane began to move
along the ground, bumping like a motorcycle, and then
slowly rose into the air,

The second of the two superior articles was datelined
from Kehl, just across the river from Strasbourg; like the
description of the flight from Paris, it was written several
weeks after the sequence of stories that followed their de-
parture from the border cities. 30 It was the longest of the
series, a little less than two thousand words. Hemingway's
central theme was the fantasy of German inflation. He
concentrated mainly, however, on the provocative tensions
and griefs the situation was creating, and the shadowy, ugly
types who profited from national catastrophe. The story
was larded with quick vignettes of personality and attitude.
Hemingway's principal episode was the gross phenomenon
of the French stampeding across the Rhine each afternoon
to stupify themselves on the excellent German pastry, now
so cheap that it could be bought for less than the value of

PARIS 163

the smallest French coin. The limitations of space, the
necessity of covering other aspects of Kehl, and the ab-
surdity of shaping a carefully dimensioned episode at the
Star's rates, prevented Hemingway from making a com-
pletely successful use of the scene. It was the pastry shop,
however, which stirred him; he sketched its proprietor,
clients, and staff. "The place was jammed with French
people of all ages and descriptions," he noticed, "all gorg-
ing cakes, while a young girl in a pink dress, silk stockings,
with a pretty, weak face and pearl earrings in her ears took
as many of their orders for fruit and vanilla ices as she could
fill. She didn't seem to care very much whether she filled
the orders or not. There were soldiers in town and she kept
going over to look out of the window." Meanwhile, Hem-
ingway saw, profiteers' cars raced by in the street, raising
clouds of dust, and "inside the pastry shop young French
hoodlums swallowed their last cakes and French mothers
wiped the sticky mouths of their children." It was sym-
bolically valid and powerful; "it gave you," he wrote, "a
new aspect on exchange."

In the meantime the first three articles had been printed
in the Daily Star. The stories presented the chronology of
the Hemingways' movements after leaving Strasbourg and
Kehl. They had been joined by Bird and his wife, and had
traveled south to Freiburg. The Americans spent four days
there; Hemingway's first German dispatch, datelined from
Freiburg on August 17, dealt more prosaically than in the
subsequent description of the pastry shop with Germany's
financial chaos. 31 The story's looseness resulted from Hem-
ingway's failure to make this a consistent structural quality.
He padded the article carelessly with paragraphs of statisti-
cal summary and hearsay comments on other parts of
Germany; he introduced a secondary theme, the current
hostility to foreigners, which ran confusingly in and out of
the narrative. The single most effective section was a de-

164 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

scription of Freiburg, a reminder that Miss Stein's first
instruction in the spring of 1922 had concentrated on his
exposition.

Freiburg seemed to be going on very well. Every room
in every hotel in town was filled. There were strings of
German hikers with rucksacks on their backs going through
the town all day long, bound for the Black Forest. Streams
of clear water flowed in the deep gutters on each side of
the clean, scrubbed-looking streets. The red stone gothic
spire of the red stone cathedral stuck up above the red-
tiled roofs of the houses. The market place was jammed on
Saturday morning with women with white handkerchiefs
over their heads selling the fruit and vegetables they had
brought in ox carts from the country. All the shops were
open and prices were very low. It looked peaceful, happy
and comfortable.

Occasionally, too, there were brief characterizations
which invigorated the catch-all, Sunday supplement treat-
ment. "We saw a girl in a coffee shop," Hemingway wrote,
"eating a breakfast of ice cream and pretzels, sitting across
the table from an officer in full uniform with an iron cross
on his chest, his flat back even more impressive than his
lean, white face, and we saw mothers feeding their rosy
faced children beer out of big half litre steins." The article's
essentially formless quality inhibited these strengths; as al-
ways, when he produced newspaper work merely to meet
a deadline or salvage expense money, Hemingway ulti-
mately relied on his bright precocity.

On the same day, August 17, Hemingway mailed another
story, this one, if we are to believe the dateline, from Tri-
berg, fifty miles to the northeast. 32 The article was fairly
long, a little over fifteen hundred words; its principal theme
was the familiar Hemingway irony of the contrast between

PARIS 165

expectation and reality. He examined the ambiguities of
German sport and character with a wry vigor that was
livelier than his Freiburg story, since he was at least dealing
with sport, absurdities, and intrigue, but his basic treatment
was the tongue-in-cheek wit that had marked his routine
journalism since 1917. His disappointment in the Black
Forest's lack of grandeur had been increased by the dis-
covery that neither was it even possible to hike in solitude.
"... you couldn't go fifteen yards along any of the wilder
and more secluded roads without running into between six
and eight Germans, their heads shaved, their knees bare,
cock feathers in their hats, sauerkraut on their breath, the
wanderlust in their eyes and a collection of aluminum
cooking utensils clashing against their legs as they walked."

The third of these articles dealing with the precise se-
quence of their Black Forest experiences was printed in the
Daily Star on September S. 33 It had a visually impressive
dateline, Oberprechtal-in-the-Black-Forest, fifteen miles
north of Triberg. The story's eighteen hundred words,
which the copy editor split into eight columns that domi-
nated page five of the Daily Star, did not rise above the
meager, chatty level of the two earlier tourist chronicles.
The article also confirms the suspicion that Hemingway's
intense hostility to the Germans was distorting his objec-
tivity as a writer. As a feature man for the Toronto Star,
of course, objectivity was not a prerequisite; his success had
come from the personal, intimate quality of his work.

As a writer, however, his primary responsibility was to
train himself in observation. An indiscriminate contempt
for the German people whom at this time he classified in
conversation as Boches and Huns would inevitably blind
him to the complexities which normally allowed his subjec-
tive treatment to be so effective. His story about Kehl had
been relatively free of this intemperance; he had been able
to detect, as a consequence, the valid symbol of the pastry

166 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

shop. The three Black Forest stories concentrated almost
completely on the traditionally unattractive racial charac-
teristics of Germans, without variety or real persuasion.
The articles began to have a nagging fretfulness.

Two final stories completed the two-three-two publishing
pattern of the series. Both were mailed from Cologne with
an incomplete dateline; since they were printed on the same
day, September 30, they were evidently sent together,
probably about the middle of the month. They were an
improvement over the previous three to the extent in
which they exchanged the querulous complaint of the
Black Forest dispatches for the more balanced, evocative
treatment of the pair mailed from Strasbourg and Kehl.
The Cologne article which seems to have been written first,
since it dealt with the train ride from Frankfurt north to
the Ruhr, had the closest resemblance to the petty antagon-
ism of the Baden trio. 34

Hemingway's hostility, stimulated in the Black Forest,
was confirmed in the crowded railway compartments. He
used a local analogy for his Toronto readers. "Traveling in
Germany now," he wrote, "is exactly as much fun as strap
hanging in an Avenue Road car during the crest of the rush
hour." His illustrations were forceful and persuasive, better
written and more graphic than his tales of the Schwartz-
wald peasantry. Essentially, however, they displayed the
same provincialism and youthful intolerance, and a readi-
ness to embrace any evidence that seemed to document a
conventional prejudice. With relish Hemingway piled
anecdote upon anecdote. The sharp, slanted vignettes are
prophetic of those sections of To Have and Have Not in
which Hemingway satirized the rich and decadent occu-
pants of the yachts in the Key West basin in 1937. These
1922 sketches have the same crisp plausibility and expert
narrative, blurred always by the easy satire of an intelli-
gent, momentarily careless mind which is dealing with

PARIS 167

material casually explored. "You must understand," Hem-
ingway would instruct the young writer in Key West
in 1935, urging him not to judge.

His final dispatch from Germany had fewer of these sub-
jective intensities and glib ironies. It was both the briefest
of the stories and the only one printed in the Star Weekly.
Hemingway imposed restraint and professionalism which,
while they sacrificed the entertaining venom of his denun-
ciatory sarcasm, supplied a maturity that was appropriate
to a temperate summary of the series. His point of view,
however, remained belligerently anti-German. He launched
a vignette demonstrating, he argued, "what [the German]
is still capable of being." A Cologne mob had recently at-
tempted to dislodge a huge equestrian statue of William
Hohenzollern, "in a brawl that started to be a revolution
and ended in a small sized riot." During the attack on the
statue, Hemingway explained, a police officer appeared.
"The mob," Hemingway reported, "threw the policeman
into the river. In the cold, swift swirl of the Rhine against
the base of the bridge the policeman hung on to one of the
abutments and shouted up that he knew who was in the
mob and would see that they were all punished. So the
mob swarmed down and tried to push the policeman loose
into the current. It meant drowning for the policeman to
let go and he hung on. Then the mob chopped his fingers
loose from the stone with the hatchet with which they had
been attacking the statue."

It was a monstrous anecdote. The only material com-
parable to it in Hemingway's early career, appropriately,
was in the brutal short story called "An Alpine Idyll," first
published in the 1927 American Caravan. Here, dealing
with the peasants who live in and below the Silvretta range,
along the Swiss-Austrian border, Hemingway used an
equally barbarous situation. His revulsion at the peasant's
callous treatment of his wife's corpse was certainly an echo

168 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

of the hostility which had been aroused in the Black Forest
in 1922. Even the satiric title of the short story had the
ironic distaste of his Daily Star dispatches.

IV.

Their four-week excursion over, the Hemingways re-
turned to Paris. The trip had enlarged the range of Hem-
ingway's European background, even if it hadn't produced
any consistently notable journalism. His hostility was
fundamental and inflexible, in part the antagonism of a
romantic temperament for what it conceived as a stolid,
unimaginative people, in part a corollary of the anti-Ger-
man indoctrination received in Italy during 1918. His point
of view was to a degree a self-consciously belligerent one,
a reminder that in his own mind he had seen far more of
German-created tragedies than most Americans. His trip
through Italy in June, only a few weeks before he went to
Germany, had reminded him of the war's horror, both in its
personal and national terms. He never responded to Ger-
many, either to its terrain or its people, as he did to France
or Spain or Italy. The episode nevertheless contributed to
his understanding of contemporary Europe. Some years
later, in an analysis of continental politics, he remembered
what he had seen in 1922. "Germany," he wrote in 1934,
"was never defeated in a military debacle." 37 He discussed
fluently the absence of a successful German post-war revo-
lution, indicating that the month in Germany in 1922,
careless and prejudiced as it had been, was also another in
the series of lessons he was receiving. One final assignment,
before he completed his 1922 travels with a capable cover-
age of war in Asia Minor, had a symbolic relationship with
the German experience.

On September 20, 1922, Hemingway was in Alsace, in-
terviewing one of his great personal heroes. The political

PARIS 169

career of Georges Clemenceau had rested on an intense
nationalism and a detestation of Germany. Hemingway had
great success with the harsh old Frenchman, whose normal
reticence dissolved under Hemingway's admiration and
made him, Hemingway said, "for once very loquacious." 38
He was bitter and violent in what he said to the young
American and in the prophecies he made for Europe. Hem-
ingway was delighted with the interview; it was a profes-
sional triumph. Ultimately, however, it only compounded
his distaste for newspaper work. The Daily Star would not
print it. They mailed it back to him, "a great Canadian
paper," Hemingway later said sardonically, and John Bone
explained the rejection in a blunt note. "[Clemenceau] can
say these things," the managing editor conceded, "but he
cannot say them in our paper." 39 It was another useful foot-
note in the variety of realities Hemingway was encounter-
ing; it also pushed him one step nearer the abandonment of
journalism.

CHAPTER
VIII

ASIA MINOR

"... I read everything that I could
understand [about war] and the more I
would sec of it the more I could
understand." ERNEST HEMINGWAY!

Hemingway was back in Paris from the Alsace interview
with Clemenceau by September 24, 1922, in time to attend
the murderous fight at the new Mont Rouge arena between
Siki and Carpentier. John Bone, however, permitted him
little time to enjoy a Paris autumn. A day or two after the
fight the managing editor cabled Hemingway to go to
Constantinople for the Daily Star. A Greek army had been
routed by the Turks; Smyrna had been burned. Lloyd
George was calling upon the Dominions to support Eng-
land's deeply involved position. There was, above all, a ter-
rible fear that the situation might at any moment produce
another world war.

Hemingway was understandably delighted. The assign-
ment was wholly different from Bone's last commission, in
March, which had postponed his creative work and sent
him to Genoa. He was enough of a newspaperman to be
deeply curious about the dramatic struggle, raising as it did
the age-old menace of Turkey invading Europe. He was
literate and imaginative; his mind responded to the obvious
memories of other Greek armies and other Eastern expedi-
tions. The massacres and terrorism were eminently news-

ASIA MINOR 171

worthy. His absorption in war, crystallized in 1918 and
since stimulated both by reflection and by innumerable
conversations with his contemporaries, was reignited by the
opportunity to observe a fluid, aggressive campaign. Listen-
ing to English friends discuss Mons and the Somme, profit-
able as it was, and assessing his own limited experience in
Italy, were academic compared to the privileged freedom
of movement of a war correspondent. He packed hurriedly.

Before he left Paris there was a luncheon with Guy
Hickok and Frank Mason; he discussed every aspect of the
assignment with the two newspapermen. Years later Mason
could remember Hemingway's excitement. He also remem-
bered, more ruefully, that he was persuaded by Heming-
way to work him onto the International News Service
expense account, in return for any material he might send
from Constantinople. It was purely an act of reluctant
friendship on Mason's part, who had long since solved the
problem of the Hearst coverage of developments in the
Near East; his Paris office merely rewrote the English and
French dispatches and cabled this version back to New
York. Hemingway thus traveled south as the representative
of a Hearst syndicate as well as a Hearst-type Canadian
paper. He would have to see the war and its politics in
vivid, communicable terms. It was, happily, that kind of
war, and his own concern, of course, was with the men
who fought it and the civilians who endured it. He would
serve John Bone far better than a Balkan expert.

Bone, on the other hand, although his conception of
Hemingway's role was as a feature writer, did not hesitate
to endow the young reporter with considerable status. "Mr.
Hemingway," the Daily Star announced, in a preface to his
first cable, u who fought with the Italian army in the great
war, is well equipped by his knowledge of the Balkans and
the Near East to cover this latest assignment given him by
The Star." 2 In terms of the normal complexity of a Balkan

172 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

crisis, this one was relatively simple. It lent itself, journal-
istically, to feature treatment. Spot news breaks were rare;
the assignment's news qualities were in the horror and
violence which both sides had introduced, and in the large,
vague clash of East and West, Moslem and Christian. The
background of the situation was readily explained by most
commentators as an early catastrophe of Versailles give-
aways.

The cynicisms of diplomatic maneuvering made dismal
reading to a generation which was bitterly realizing that it
had not fought itself out of the pre-1914 entanglements.
The governments of England, France, Italy, and Russia
were plainly jockeying for position, offering short-term
promises and some aid to the particular belligerent of their
choice. English prestige and position were therefore en-
dangered when the Greeks were badly mauled on Septem-
ber 7, 1922 in Anatolia, in a decisive battle begun ten days
earlier. The Greeks fled across the remaining two hundred
miles to the Aegean sanctuary. Civilian refugees began to
crowd into Smyrna, which was penetrated by Turkish cav-
alry on September 9. On September 14 fire broke out in
the Christian section of the panicky city. The Greeks had
by this time turned the city over to the Allied commanders.
Kemal Atatiirk rejected all armistice proposals, persisting in
his demands for the return of Adrianople and Smyrna. He
threatened to invade the British mandate of Mesopotamia
if his claims were not granted. Constantinople itself didn't
seem altogether secure against his army.

This was the situation as Hemingway picked it up when,
according to the Daily Star's dramatic preface, he "suc-
ceeded in reaching Constantinople" on September 30. He
promptly cabled a summary of the scene within the city. 3
His three-paragraph cable, bolstered by a triple bank of
headlines and the italicized editorial description of him and
his assignment, occupied the two important columns on the

ASIA MINOR 173

left hand side of the Daily Star's front page. Even in the
seventy-word cable he aimed for impressionism, creating it
both by a string of positive adjectives "Constantinople is
noisy, hot, hilly, dirty, and beautiful" and by a sense of
tension in such familiar cabelese as "packed with uniforms
and rumors" and "Foreigners . . . have booked outgoing
trains for weeks ahead." His next dispatch, filed four days
later, defined more clearly the approach he would use in
these longer, mailed treatments. 4

The story had as its lead the initial stages of the armistice
talks at Mudania. Hemingway described the town as "a
hot, dusty, badly-battered, second-rate seaport on the Sea
of Marmora." He enlivened the sobriety of his basic theme
with a mockery of the military which would be well re-
ceived in recently demobilized Toronto, where the resent-
ment of the English officer caste was almost a municipal
characteristic. He also emphasized English and French re-
sponsibility for the war; his generation's distaste for diplo-
matic intrigue was evident throughout his entire coverage
of the assignment. "The British wanted control in Asia
Minor," he pointed out, "but Kemal did not look like a
good buy to them." Hemingway moved on to what inter-
ested him much more, the fighting itself and the two armies
engaged in it. His summary of the campaign was breath-
lessly perceptive and positive. "Kemal whipped the Greeks
as every one knows. But when you realize that he was
fighting a conscript army whose soldiers the barren country
they were fighting to gain hated, who had been mobilized
for nine years, who had no desire as men to conquer Asia
Minor, and who were thoroughly fed up and becoming
conscious that they were going into battle to die doing a
cat's paw job, it was not the magnificent military achieve-
ment that it is made out to be."

Hemingway completed his broad definition of the several
aspects of the scene with a description of Russia's role in

174 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

the Near East; his aim was to provide a round-up of the
backstage realities. The general tone of all his dispatches,
in fact, was primarily realistic. He explored vigorously the
political, diplomatic, and military aspects of the situation.
His idiom, emphasis, and attitude were harsh and uncom-
promising. He was not the easy sensationalist, finding scare
headlines and complacent cynicism in every trivial altera-
tion of the crisis; neither was he content with the wide-eyed
wonder that was the journalistic stock-in-trade of so many
American correspondents during the 1920's. He did not
rely on actual or imaginary first-name contacts with the
great and the notorious.

The importance to Hemingway of the freedom and re-
sponsibility of his whole foreign assignment for the Star
he had now written more than thirty articles in six months
and the personal growth that occurred through the Euro-
pean experience, are verified by the adult quality of his war
correspondence. He was troubled by the implications of
the situation, by the revelations of new diplomatic inepti-
tude and corruption, and by the threat to world peace.
John Bone, an editor of breadth and judgment, described
Hemingway's European work as "a special feature in The
Star." 5 Hemingway was by no means an experienced re-
porter. He had detoured or condensed the various journal-
istic drudgeries that normally preface the assignments he
received or created. Because of this, and because too of
the kind of training he had received in Kansas City, his
reporting was never wholly conventional. The content and
treatment of his dispatches, by October, 1922, were gen-
erally fresh and mature. They testified to a poise unusual
in a young man of twenty-three.

On October 5 he mailed a third story it was flown to
Paris, actually, and traveled by ship from France to Canada
which indicated both his sobriety of purpose and his
thoroughness in familiarizing himself with the background

ASIA MINOR 175

of this fluid situation. 6 He focused on Kemal, the most im-
portant single figure in the complex of intrigue. Although
much of the material was picked up from the shop talk of
his colleagues, Hemingway injected into it an imaginative
vivification through analogy and characterization. He drew
from contemporary politics a parallel which would be a
meaningful one for the people of a Dominion city.
"[Kemal] is now in something of the position Arthur
Griffith and Michael Collins occupied in Ireland just before
their deaths." Hemingway extended the Irish analogy. "As
yet," he wrote, "his de Valera has not appeared." Heming-
way argued that Mesopotamia was the critical acquisition
for the Kemalists. "Whichever alliance Turkey drops clears
the air very little, because the one big aim of the Kemalists,
the one which they are being criticized now in their own
circles for not having fulfilled, the aim which does not
appear in any published pacts but that everyone in the
country understands, is the possession of Mesopotamia." 7
Hemingway's final paragraph was a blunt summary and
forecast.

It is oil that Kemal and company want Mesopotamia for,
and it is oil that Great Britain wants to keep Mesopotamia
for, so the East that is disappointed in Kemal the Saladin
because he shows no inclination to plunge into a fanatical
holy war, may yet get their war from Kemal the business
man.

Hemingway did not limit himself to the large geopoliti-
cal issues. Remembering that his paper was being supplied
each day with wire service cables, and exercising his par-
ticular gifts, he filed on October 6 a long, full-column study
of Constantinople. 8 "Old timers always call it Constan," he
pointed out, "just as you are a tenderfoot if you call Gibral-
tar anything but Gib." This careful, ingenuous accuracy

176 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

was fundamental to his portrait of the city. His theme was
the paradox of Constantinople's contradictory qualities; the
description was an exercise in authenticity, tempered by the
sensitive, romantic point of view which originally allowed
him to recognize the paradox.

"In the morning," he began, "when you wake and see a
mist over the Golden Horn with the minarets rising out of
it slim and clean towards the sun and the Muezzin calling
the faithful to prayer in a voice that soars and dips like an
aria from a Russian opera, you have the magic of the east."
His next paragraph smashed the illusion. "There may be,"
he conceded, "a happy medium between the east of Pierre
Lori's stories and the east of everyday life, but it could only
be found by a man who always looked with his eyes half
shut, didn't care what he ate, and was immune to the bites
of insects." Hemingway strengthened the paradox with a
catalogue of the inhabitants whom the city now sheltered.
Its population was estimated at a million and a half. "This,"
he declared, "does not include hundreds of battered Fords,
forty thousand Russian refugees in every uniform of the
Czar's army in all stages of dilapidation, and about an equal
number of Kemalist troops in civilian clothes who have
filtered into the city in order to make sure that Constan-
tinople will go to Kemal no matter how the peace negotia-
tions come out." The paragraph's last sentence had an
impressive finality. "All these," Hemingway wrote, "have
entered since the last estimate."

His precise catalogue of the city, as orderly and compre-
hensive as a large scale map, included an outline of night
life of the city, where the theaters did not open until ten
o'clock. "The night clubs open at two, the more respecta-
ble night clubs that is. The disreputable night clubs open at
four in the morning." Hemingway mentioned discreetly the
Galata settlement, as befitted a correspondent for a family
paper that nonetheless granted the readability of vice. He ex-

ASIA MINOR 177

plained that the small cluster of buildings, half way up the
hill from the port, had "a district that is more unspeakably
horrible than the foulest heyday of the old Barbary Coast.
It festers there, trapping the soldiers and sailors of all the
allies and of all nations."

Hemingway continued this personal, feature treatment in
his next dispatch, despite the fact that the article was a
cable, datelined October 9 from Constantinople and reach-
ing Toronto in time to be used in the late afternoon editions
that same day. 9 Hemingway had not yet dealt with the
potential threat to Christians. This was one of the major
news values of the situation, prominently exploited in the
coverage by the New York press and the wire services. It
was of particular interest to a pious, church-going com-
munity like Toronto. For the answers, Hemingway duti-
fully sought out Hamid Bey, "next to Kemal, perhaps," he
wrote, "the most powerful man in the Angora government."

Hemingway's instinct for characterization, and his gift
for the effective interviewing of celebrities this was the
primary assignment for which John Bone ultimately brought
him back to Canada in the early fall of 1923 allowed him
to ignore massacres for the first two paragraphs. "Bismarck,"
he cabled, "said all men in the Balkans who tuck their shirts
into their trousers are crooks. The shirts of the peasants, of
course, hang outside. At any rate, when I found Hamid
Bey ... in his Stamboul office where he directs his Kemal-
ist government in Europe, while drawing a large salary as
administrator of the Imperial Ottoman Bank, a French
capitalized concern his shirt was tucked in, for he was
dressed in a grey business suit."

Hemingway's final dispatch from Constantinople his
sixth in little more than a week was mailed the following
day. 10 Mindful of his obligations as a Canadian correspond-
ent, he located a topic of particular interest to an Empire
audience. Afghanistan's borders touched almost every sore

178 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

spot in the area, and its proximity to Mesopotamia was
doubly significant because of Kemal's designs on the oil-
rich English mandate. Hemingway's imagination responded
to the proud, martial code of the Afghans. He incorpor-
ated the techniques of personal verification, political real-
ism, and careful dialogue and vignettes. Shere Mohamet
Khan, whom Hemingway had previously met in Rome,
"was tall, dark-haired, hawk-faced, as straight as a lance,
with the bird-of-prey eyes and the hooked nose that mark
the Afghan . . . like a man out of the renaissance. . . ."

He translated the history of Afghanistan through a blend
of chronology and personalities, emphasizing always the
Afghan hatred of England. He told the story of the former
Amir of Afghanistan "all his life he hated the English"
who was "a great man ... a hard man, a far-seeing man and
an Afghan." The Amir spent his entire life consolidating
his tribal domain into a unified nation, and in training his
son. "His son," Hemingway explained, "was to carry on
his work to make war on the English." The Kiplingesque
quality which Gertrude Stein had previously noted in his
poetry was more than just the coincidence of the material.
The idiom and sentence structure, as well as the essential
attitude and treatment, are reminders that Hemingway later
recommended the Englishman's short stories, emphatically,
as profitable models for a young writer. 11

The old man died. The son, Habibullah Khan, became
Amir. The English invited him to come down to India on
a state visit, and he went to see what manner of people these
English were. There the English got him. First, they enter-
tained him royally. They showed him many delights and
they taught him to drink. I do not say he was not an apt
learner. He was no longer a man and an Afghan.

Hemingway's six Constantinople stories had touched on
almost every element in the explosive, varied situation. He

ASIA MINOR 179

had defined the nature of the Turkish position, with par-
ticular emphasis on the all-important French and Russian
alliances. He had attempted an analysis of the composition
of the Kemalist group, and its prospects for continued
unity. He had given a vivid base to the articles through the
portrait of the city, and his sketch of Hamid Bey supplied
a glimpse of Turkish leadership and a foreshadowing of
what a Turkish occupation of Constantinople could imply.
The essay on Afghanistan had reminded his readers of the
fragility of European peace. He had cabled and mailed
John Bone a comprehensive feature treatment of the assign-
ment. Hemingway's reservations about newspaper work
have always been sound ones, but during this entire period
as a foreign correspondent in 1922 he had on the whole the
sort of duties, and gave to them the kind of treatment,
which reduced some of the dangers, creatively speaking, of
a journalistic apprenticeship. He had, above all, done a
minimum of spot news reporting.

"When you describe something that has happened that
day," he wrote in 1935, "the timeliness makes people see it
in their own imaginations. A month later that element of
time is gone and your account would be flat and they
would not see in their minds nor remember it." 32

Hemingway, at least until he covered the Lausanne Con-
ference late in 1922, was able to give to his journalism in-
gredients which to a degree replaced the false strength of
timeliness. "But if you make it up instead of describe it," he
continued on that same occasion in the 1930's, once again
paraphrasing Miss Stein's lessons, "you can make it round
and whole and solid and give it life. You create it, for good
or bad. It is made; not described." Hemingway had not
made up his Constantinople dispatches, but neither had he
been imprisoned within the restrictions of topical reporting.
He could have remained indefinitely in the city, finding
other ramifications of the broad outline he had already

180 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

written. Constantinople was exciting and turbulent, full of
drama and romance and excess, and never more so than in
October, 1922. Years later Hemingway wrote a little of it
into the introspection of the writer dying in the shadow of
Kilimanjaro, as Harry remembers that in Constantinople,
after a night of violence and brawling, he "drove out to
Rimmily Hissa along the Bosphorus." 13

The instinct that made Hemingway a good reporter
eventually eclipsed the charm of the gay, reckless life, with
its echoes of 1918 moods. When he had filed his Afghanistan
dispatch he left Constantinople and went after what was
for him a story more important than even the political and
diplomatic realities. He moved southward and followed the
Greek army as it evacuated Eastern Thrace. He had missed
the climactic fighting in August and September; he had no
intention of missing this later phase. From Italian soldiers
and officers in 1918, and from other wounded men in the
Milan hospital, Hemingway had heard the stories about
Caporetto; now, four years later, he was about to see his
own variation of the Italian retreat.

Hemingway's reaction to the tragic spectacle of military
defeat and betrayal was personal and imaginative. He date-
lined the first of this second set of Near East dispatches
from Muradii, a small village near Lake Van, several hun-
dred miles east of Constantinople, on October 14. 14 He was
an accurate, informative reporter of this basic element of
war, the withdrawal of a large body of men through hostile
country. The experience illuminated everything he had
read of all war, what he had heard of the American Civil
War, and what he had sensed and witnessed in Italy. The
things he found in Eastern Thrace told him precisely what
an army looks like during an evacuation.

ASIA MINOR 181

In their ill-fitting U.S. uniforms they are trekking across
the country, cavalry patrols out ahead, the soldiers march-
ing sullenly but occasionally grinning at us as we pass their
strung-out, straggling columns. They have cut all the tele-
graph wires behind them; you see them dangling from the
poles like Maypole ribbons. They have abandoned their
thatched huts, their camouflaged gun positions, their ma-
chine gun nests, and all the heavily wired, strung out, forti-
fied ridges where they had planned to make a last stand
against the Turk. . . . Some soldiers lie on top of the mounds
of baggage, while others goad the buffalo along. Ahead and
behind the baggage carts are strung out the troops. This is
the end of the great Greek military adventure.

Hemingway's primary concern, though he was acutely
aware of the tactics and strategy of withdrawal, was with
the individual Greek soldier. "Even in the evacuation," he
wrote, "the Greek soldiers looked like good troops." Hem-
ingway learned a great deal from an English captain, a
cavalryman from the Indian Army. Captain Wittal was one
of the two officers attached to the Greeks as an observer
during the fighting around Angora in the late summer.
Hemingway tried hard to put the idiom and inflection of
the English officer's speech into the article's dialogue. " 'In
the one show in Anatolia,' Captain Wittal said, 'the Greek
infantry were doing an absolutely magnificent attack and
their artillery was doing them in.' " Wittal also told Hem-
ingway about Major Johnson, the other English observer,
an experienced gunner who was so shocked by the unpro-
fessional spectacle that he " 'cried at what those gunners
were doing to their infantry.' " Years later this became
another of the fragments of memory in "The Snows of
Kilimanjaro"; Harry remembers "where they had made the
attack with the newly arrived Constantine officers, that did
not know a god-damned thing, and the artillery had fired

182 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

into the troops and the British observer had cried like a
child." Hemingway's last sentences in the 1922 dispatch
were clear and bitter, testimony to his imaginative involve-
ment in the scene.

All day I have been passing them, dirty, tired, unshaven,
wind-bitten soldiers hiking along the trails across the brown,
rolling, barren Thracian country. No bands, no relief or-
ganizations, no leave areas, nothing but lice, dirty blankets,
and mosquitoes at night. They are the last of the glory that
was Greece. This is the end of their second siege of Troy.

Hemingway learned other things about a retreat, things
he didn't mail to Toronto but saved for the long Caporetto
passages he wrote in 1929 for A Farewell to Arms. He had
other stories, too, from Captain Wittal and from Major
Johnson; the latter had become press liaison officer in Con-
stantinople. Once again Hemingway saved them for Harry's
dying monologue. "That was the day he'd first seen dead
men wearing white ballet skirts and upturned shoes with
pompons on them ... he and the British observer had run
. . . until his lungs ached and his mouth was full of the
taste of pennies and they stopped behind some rocks and
there were the Turks coming as lumpily as ever." In 1922,
however, Hemingway filed no further details on the mili-
tary aspects of the evacuation. He moved north toward the
vast civilian exodus from Western Thrace. He stopped
briefly in Constantinople, 15 and then on October 20, now
many miles north of the city, he cabled from Adrianople
a fine story of the refugees who were moving out of East-
ern Thrace. 16 It was harsh and compressed, a vivid recapitu-
lation of civilian tragedy. In 1922 its horror had not become
a global commonplace; Hemingway saw it with a fresh,
shocked awareness.

ASIA MINOR 183

In a never-ending, staggering march the Christian popu-
lation of Eastern Thrace is jamming the roads towards
Macedonia. The main column crossing the Maritza River
at Adrianople is twenty miles long. Twenty miles of carts
drawn by cows, bullocks and muddy-flanked water buffalo,
with exhausted, staggering men, women, and children, blan-
kets over their heads, walking blindly in the rain beside
their worldly goods.

This spectacle of refugee misery, beyond all the rest of
what he saw in Asia Minor, left the most permanent scar
on Hemingway. In his creative work he made far more use
of what he learned from the military catastrophe; he told
Malcolm Cowley, in fact, that he "really learned about war"
in the Near East. 17 The civilian suffering, however, gave a
new dimension to his determination to be a writer. He has
always been generous and quick in his response to grief.
His ready, decent anger had already been displayed in his
indignation about Italian fascism. His susceptibilities once
caused him to explain that "I cannot see a horse down in
the street without having it make me feel a necessity for
helping the horse, and I have spread sacking, unbuckled
harness and dodged shod hoofs many times and will again if
they have horses on city streets in wet and icy weather.
. . ," 18 Hemingway had neither seen nor imagined such
human suffering as he saw in October, 1922, along the road
to Adrianople.

When he got back to France after finishing his Greco-
Turk assignment, he made on the basis of it a decision about
his career. "I remember," he said thirty years later, "coming
home from the Near East . . . absolutely heartbroken at
what was going on and in Paris trying to decide whether
I would put my whole life into trying to do something
about it or to be a writer." His indignation made the deci-
sion a difficult one; he had been raised, after all, in the

184 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

decent world of Oak Park, with its middle-class, nineteenth-
century heritage of New England humanitarianism. "I de-
cided," he said in 1951, "cold as a snake, to be a writer and
to write as truly as I could all my life." 19 The terse clarity
of the Adrianople cable, which the Daily Star used on the
first page of the second section, could not disguise what he
was feeling. Once he had established the scene in the first
three paragraphs, in exposition as effective as any journal-
ism he had yet written, 20 Hemingway quickly ended the
cable. His last two paragraphs, for there were only five in
all, were an explicit plea for help. "At Adrianople," he
cabled, "where the main stream moves through, there is no
Near East relief at all. They are doing very good work at
Rodosto on the coast, but can only touch the fringe."

He completed his Near East assignment three days later,
with a long, two-thousand-word article which John Bone
spread out across a whole page. 21 Hemingway was at last
out of sight of that grim procession. He wrote the final dis-
patch as he rode through Bulgaria, and mailed it from Sofia
on October 23. He pretended to a retrospective softening
of the horror. "In a comfortable train," he declared, "with
the horrors of the Thracian evacuation behind me, it was al-
ready beginning to seem unreal. That is the boon of our
memories." His second paragraph was a more curt and
precise appraisal of his mood. "I have described that evacu-
ation," he said bleakly, "in a cable to The Star from Adri-
anople. It does no good to go over it again. The evacuation
still keeps up." His memories were in reality far from
sublimated.

No matter how long it takes this letter to get to Toronto,
as you read this in The Star you may be sure that the same
ghastly, shambling procession of people being driven from
their homes is filing in unbroken line along the muddy road

ASIA MINOR 185

to Macedonia. A quarter of a million people take a long
time to move.

Hemingway then supplied a detailed account of his move-
ments and experiences during that period from which he
had compressed his cable of three days earlier. "Adrianople
itself," he wrote, u is not a pleasant place." He described the
railway station, "a mud-hole crowded with soldiers, bun-
dles, bed-springs, bedding, sewing machines, babies, broken
carts, all in the mud and the drizzling rain." The scene was
the more horrible from being lit only with kerosene flares;
it was one of those "very simple things," as he explained
later, which he tried in his early work to make "permanent,
as, say, Goya tried to make them in Los Desastres de la
Guerra" 22 He returned always, however, to the procession
itself, particularly in a long, single sentence paragraph that
reaffirmed the cable. "I walked five miles with the refugees
[sic] procession along the road . . . always the slow, rain
soaked, shambling, trudging Thracian peasantry plodding
along in the rain, leaving their homes behind."

Hemingway ended his Near East assignment with vi-
gnettes of the tough, callous opportunism of Madame Marie,
the prospering operator of Adrianople's only hotel. He car-
ried with him a final impression of indifference toward suf-
fering, as he traveled by train from Sofia north through
Serbia and on to Trieste. Paris itself was a splendid contrast
to Adrianople; the races at Anteuil were very good that
year and he watched them from under a bright, blue No-
vember sky. As with Harry in "The Snows of Kiliman-
jaro," however, there were aspects of Paris which only
aggravated his memories. "So when he got back to Paris
that time he could not talk about it or stand to have it
mentioned. And there in the cafe as he passed was that
American poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and a
stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada move-

186 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

ment with a Roumanian who said his name was Tristan
Tzara, who always wore a monocle and had a headache."

The Asia Minor assignment gave Hemingway's under-
standing of war a depth impossible on the basis of his Italian
experience alone. His education was extended by another
lesson in geopolitical realities. The area of his physical back-
ground had been enlarged; a Balkan campaign had given
him a wider base for the worldliness by which he illumi-
nated so much of his early work. Few young men of
twenty-three could draw on a Near East experience. Hem-
ingway drew on it heavily. Of the sixteen brief inter-chap-
ters in In Our Time, in 1925, three of the most forceful
came from the Asia Minor assignment.

In 1930, when he was preparing a new edition of the
short story collection, he included a prelude which he later
entitled, "On the Quai at Smyrna." 23 The appalling cruelty
toward their animals, by Greeks and Turks, had an almost
traumatic effect on Hemingway. He used it not only in the
1930 sketch but also in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and
twice in Death in the Afternoon. On that particular occa-
sion, in fact, as if aware of the psychotic way in which he
was returning to the scene, Hemingway allowed the Old
Lady to chide him for his preoccupation. "You wrote about
those mules before," she reminds him. "I know it," Hem-
ingway replied, "and I'm sorry. Stop interrupting. I won't
write about them again. I promise." 24

He was equally absorbed by the technical possibilities of
cabelese. A few weeks later, back in Europe, he showed
his refugee cable to Lincoln StefFens. Steffens was impressed
by the story's exposition. Hemingway protested this re-
sponse. "I was seeing the scene and said so," Steffens ex-
plained subsequently. "No," Hemingway had corrected

ASIA MINOR 187

him, "read the cabelese, only the cabelese. Isn't it a great
language?" 25 Most of the cabelese he sent from Asia Minor,
however, had been for the International News Service
rather than the Daily Star. None of his I.N.S. material was
by-lined, nor were there any permanent records to verify
his Hearst coverage. The arrangement had been a private
one between Hemingway and Frank Mason. 26 More than
a decade later Hemingway described the kind of material
he cabled I.N.S. from Asia Minor. It was the conventional,
telegraphic cabelese rather than the curt but nevertheless
formed cabelese he had sent to the Daily Star. His output,
sent at three dollars a word to, he said satirically, Monu-
mental News Service, "would be something on this or-
der: KEMAL INSWARDS UNBURNED SMYRNA
GUILTY GREEKS ... to appear as 'Mustapha Kemal in
an exclusive interview today with the correspondent of the
Monumental News Service denied vehemently that the
Turkish forces had any part in the burning of Smyrna. The
city, Kemal stated, was fired by incendiaries in the troops
of the Greek rear guard before the first Turkish patrols
entered the city.' " 2T

Hemingway's tenuous connection with the Hearst or-
ganization did not become weaker or even non-existent, as
might have been expected, but stronger. He had only a
few weeks of rehabilitation in Paris in November, 1922.
John Bone ordered him to Lausanne to cover the confer-
ence assembling there for the diplomatic settlement of the
whole Greco-Turk affair. Hemingway's coverage of the
Near East assignment, however, was reversed at Lausanne.
In Switzerland he did most of his writing for Universal
News, the second of Hearst's overseas news agencies,
rather than for the Toronto Star.

CHAPTER

IX

LA USANNE

"And at a busy typewriter outside the
door of the British press-room, cabling
hourly bulletins ... sat ... Ernest
Hemingway." GEORGE SLocoMBE 1

Hemingway almost left the Lausanne Conference before
it was thoroughly under way. At the end of the first week,
although the meeting was of special interest to a Canadian
paper, Hemingway had made up his mind to return to
Paris. He told Henry Wales, who was in Lausanne for the
Chicago Tribune, that he "could not stand the expenses in
Switzerland." 2 This was always a troublesome aspect of
Hemingway's relationship with the Star; he paid his own
way while covering an assignment, and eventually was re-
imbursed, and his material paid for, after he had filed an
expense account.

Wales, who was then Floyd Gibbons's assistant, located
a compromise by which Hemingway could remain at Laus-
anne. An hour or two after talking to Hemingway, Wales
got a phone call from Charles Bertelli, the chief Hearst
correspondent in France. Bertelli, who was also in charge
of the Paris office of Hearst's Universal News Service, told
Wales that he wasn't going to be able to attend the con-
ference himself. He asked the Tribune correspondent to
suggest someone who would cover the assignment for
Universal. Bertelli's principal concern was with the press

LAUSANNE 189

conferences and the daily communiques. He also wanted
the reporter to pick up any general news he could find and
telephone it to Paris every evening; Bertelli could then
write a complete story each day. Wales immediately told
Hemingway to get in touch with Bertelli.

The arrangement was characteristic both of the Hearst
news agencies in general and of Bertelli in particular. He
himself remembered the association with Hemingway in
much the same terms as Wales. "I was overwhelmed with
work," Bertelli said in 1952. "[Therefore] we provided
with someone over there to keep us covered and the some-
one happened to be Hemingway." 3 His work for Universal,
Bertelli explained, "was only short flashes and newsy stuff
and nothing descriptive or long requiring the signature of
a well-known writer."

Hemingway recalled the Universal assignment as a la-
borious one. He described it, quite accurately, as "running
a twenty-four-hour wire service for an afternoon and morn-
ing news service." 4 It was journalism of a sort he had been
previously spared. Almost entirely spot news, it was routine
and undramatic and had a minimum of feature possibilities.
As Bertelli had anticipated, virtually all of it was in the form
of official hand-outs. One correspondent, Ludwell Denny,
describing the first six weeks of the conference for the
Nation, went so far as to declare that there was "an abso-
lute control of the news sources." 5 From the beginning the
newspapermen were barred from the conference sessions,
which opened on November 20 in the Lausanne Casino.
They were also excluded from the building to which the
conference then moved, the Hotel du Chateau at Ouchy.
There was no point in the reporters interviewing the lesser
delegates, who, according to Denny, were "as ignorant
as they of what goes on up in Curzon's room." The
only important delegate who held press conferences was
Tchitcherin, the Soviet foreign minister. He didn't arrivje

190 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

at the conference until December, and his substitute, in-
deed, was at first refused full admission to the meetings.

Hemingway, of course, had to attend faithfully the daily
ceremony at which the English secretary released the Brit-
ish interpretation of current activities. Inasmuch as he had
to wire material both to Universal, whose stories were gen-
erally used by Hearst's morning papers, and to I.N.S.,
which was in a sense the afternoon agency, Hemingway
also covered the other delegations in search of material.
"Since each country was anxious to present its version of
what had happened," Hemingway later explained, "before
credence was given to any other country's account, these
press conferences followed in rapid succession and you had
to step very fast to get them all in." 6 Hemingway normally
filed his last dispatch around three in the morning and left
another story with the concierge "to open the wire with in
the morning at seven." At noon he gathered with the other
correspondents in the bar of the enormous Beau-Rivage
Hotel, on Lake Geneva, where the British and Italian dele-
gates were staying; later in the afternoon he went up into
the town to the Palace Hotel to get the French and Turkish
communiques.

Hemingway was encountering, with the rest of the press,
the same resistance he had resented in the English lieutenant
colonel at the Mudania Conference in October. Secret
diplomacy, official hand-outs, and the suave, high pressure
tactics of Lord Curzon were another lesson in political
realities. The effect of the conference on Hemingway, and
its contribution to his creative production, are indicated by
the poem which was accepted by the Little Review and
published in its Exiles' Number in the spring of 1923. 7 Its
title "They All Want Peace What Is Peace?" summed
up his contempt. Its lines and themes were forceful and
precocious.

LAUSANNE 191

M. Stambuliski walks up the hill and down the hill. Don't

talk about M. Venizelos. He is wicked. You can see it. His

beard shows it.

Mr. Child is not wicked.

Mrs. Child has flat breasts and Mr. Child is an idealist and

wrote Harding's campaign speeches and calls Senator

Beveridge Al.

His antagonism embraced his vocation as well as diplo-
macy. His mockery of the newspapermen's complacent
wisdom "Well what do you boys know this morning?
/ Oh they're shrewd. They're shrewd." indicated that he
was once again restless with journalism. The parody of a
child's primer, coupled with the coarse realism, made the
poem an effective statement. Hemingway's obligation to
Gertrude Stein was in this case a large one. He explained
to Edmund Wilson a few months later that he had written
the verse on the train back to Lausanne from Paris, after a
lunch and afternoon of talk with Miss Stein. 8 Remember-
ing that he had to open the Universal wire again in the
morning, Hemingway sat over a bottle of Beaune in the
dining car and tried to define the conference. "Her method
is invaluable . . . ," Hemingway told Wilson. "She has a
wonderful head."

Hemingway did not arrive at such disillusionment solely
on the basis of his previous encounters with diplomatic
parleys, as observed at Genoa and Mudania, nor solely on
his own reaction to the Lausanne Conference. The confer-
ence's deceit was all the more painful to him, of course,
because he had so recently seen its background of refugee
processions. It was also at Lausanne, however, that Hem-
ingway received his most significant lessons in political re-
ality, from a South African correspondent who took a liking
to him and gave him his first formal instruction.

192 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

William Bolitho Ryall he did not take the name William
Bolitho, by which he is more widely remembered, until
several years later was representing the Manchester Guard-
ian at Lausanne. 9 Both his temperament and his biography
made him a persuasive mentor for Hemingway. "He had
been very badly blown up in the war," Hemingway once
wrote, "while commanding infantry. Afterwards he had
gotten into the intelligence service and at the time of
[Versailles] he had been a sort of pay-off man for the dis-
bursing of certain sums spent by the British to subsidize
and influence certain individuals and certain organs of the
French press." 10

It would be hard to imagine a man whose martial and
professional backgrounds would make him more highly
regarded by Hemingway in 1922. He had been wounded
as a foot soldier and he had been on the inside of large, pre-
tentious diplomatic schemes. "None of us thought of him as
a genius then," Hemingway said later of the period, "and
I do not think he thought of himself as one either, being
too busy, too intelligent, and, then, too sardonic to go in
for being a genius in a city where they were a nickel a
dozen and it was much more distinguished to be hard work-
ing." 11 Bolitho had virtually every quality which would
make him the first substantial non-literary influence on
Hemingway since Pete Wellington and Lionel Moise in
Kansas City. Later, of course, Bolitho did acquire a literary
reputation. Much of his newspaper work was collected,
and his Twelve Against the Gods, published in 1929, had
for a time an enormous reputation. 12 When Hemingway
knew him, however, Bolitho's force was being exerted
largely through his personality. "As I was a kid then,"
Hemingway wrote in 1935, "he told me many things that

LAUSANNE 193

were the beginning of whatever education I received in
international politics." 13

Walter Duranty, who saw a great deal of Bolitho during
the early 1920's, gave a version of the South African which
was almost identical to Hemingway's. Like Hemingway,
the New York Times correspondent remembered Bolitho 's
"brilliant political insight and flair for the underlying re-
alities of any situation"; he also declared that Bolitho
"taught me ... to think for myself." 14 Duranty, who dedi-
cated his autobiography to Bolitho's memory, said in 1935
that "of all the people I have met in the last twenty years,
and there have been some high-sounding names amongst
them, I think Bolitho had the finest intellect." 15

Bolitho later became a special writer for the New York
World. Even in that precocious company he was a com-
pelling figure. Those who knew him in Manhattan in 1928
and 1929 had the same response as young newspapermen
like Duranty and Hemingway. "To hear Bolitho talk," said
Alexander Woollcott, characteristically, "was to listen to
one who himself dwelt outside of time." 16 Walter Lipp-
mann testified to the same quality. "He was an eager guide,"
Lippmann wrote. "In any company he took the floor at
the beginning of the evening and held it until the end, thus
saving himself and the rest of the party much weariness." 17
Lippmann added that "in his company ordinary things were
transfigured, acquiring the glamour of mystery and great
import."

Bolitho, for Hemingway, was a more literate and in-
formed Lionel Moise, with a self-discipline that Heming-
way had missed in Moise. Hemingway's own tributes to
Bolitho are explicit and personal. The characteristics which
attracted Hemingway to Moise in 1918 could not possibly
have had the same effect on him in 1922; he had grown
beyond Moise, but he could learn from Bolitho. Even the
skepticism Hemingway was feeling about journalism was

194 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

shared by Bolitho, a fine columnist who nonetheless argued
that newspaper work was a stepping-stone but not a career.
The contempt for the trade which Hemingway had written
into his poem on the Lausanne Conference "Oh they're
shrewd. They're shrewd." was an absolute duplicate of
Bolitho's own attitude toward his vocation.

"Exchange the newspaper game," Bolitho urgently ad-
vised Duranty, "for the thing we are trained to do, namely,
writing. Books or plays, or what have you; in other words,"
he argued, "... capitalize your knowledge and experience
and capacity for putting words on paper in a way that will
interest your readers." Bolitho had a compassionate distaste
for those who stayed too long in journalism. "I don't care
whether it's fact or fiction," he told Duranty, "but it's got
to be done somehow unless you want to end up like old
Whiskers' you know who I mean as a burnt-out re-
porter cadging drinks and dead-dog assignments from his
younger friends."

Hemingway was susceptible to such advice. Gertrude
Stein had already urged him to get out of journalism. The
positive assurance of such a man as Bolitho, coming as it
did in the wake of Miss Stein's identical position, would
have important consideration for Hemingway. "The echoes
of his voice," Lippmann wrote in 1937 in his memoir about
Bolitho, "are still about us." In the early winter of 1922
Hemingway was exposed continuously to that voice. He
and Bolitho were together almost every night in Lausanne.
When Hemingway wrote for Esquire in the 1930's some
articles on European politics, he leaned heavily on what he
had learned from Bolitho during those two months. One
night Bolitho explained to him the familiar concept that
power affects all men in a certain way. The South African
maintained that sooner or later you could always detect the
symptoms. He even persuaded Hemingway that they were
evident in his personal hero, Clemenceau.

LAUSANNE 195

Bolitho's wit was hearty and sardonic. He quoted for
Hemingway, in illustration of his power thesis, a certain
Lord of the British Admiralty. It had become impossible
for anyone to work with him, Bolitho explained one of
the effects of power and the final smash came at a dis-
cussion of how to get a better class of cadets for the Royal
Navy. The admiral hammered on the table, according to
Bolitho, and shouted, "Gentlemen, if you do not know
where to get them, by God I will make them for you!" 18
Bolitho strengthened in Hemingway his knowledgeability,
his instinct for being on the inside, and his insistence that
one should think for himself. Hemingway wasn't with
Bolitho during the months when he was having his New
York success, but he remembered him with affection and
gratitude. "I never saw him after he became Bolitho,"
Hemingway said once, "but when he was Ryall he was a
wonderful guy. He may have been even finer when he was
Bolitho but I do not see how it would be possible." 19

Lausanne thus became the kind of newspaper assignment
at which a great many disreputable anecdotes about the
diplomats were cynically exchanged by the journalists un-
der very pleasant circumstances. The weather was excel-
lent, Hemingway boxed in the mornings, usually with G.
Ward Price, the London Daily Mail's correspondent, 20
and, as in Constantinople, there was a good deal of alcoholic
gaiety among the press. Beyond this, however, there was
the discipline of continuous writing, even if it so often con-
sisted of mere rephrasing of official communiques, and there
was the stimulant of Bolitho. At Lausanne Hemingway also
saw a good deal of Lincoln Steffens, whose confidence in
Hemingway's writing future was immediate and certain.
The celebrated muckraker read Hemingway's "rejected

196 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

manuscripts, and read short stories, since published, which
made me, as they did Guy Hickok and other reporters,
sure of Hemingway." 21

The short stories could only have been "Up in Michigan"
and "My Old Man," for it was just before this that a valise
containing all of Hemingway's work except those two
pieces was stolen from a train in the Gare du Lyons. Mrs.
Hemingway, in fact, was bringing the material from Paris
to Lausanne, she remembered, and in particular an unfin-
ished novel, "because of Ernest's letters singing high praises
of Lincoln Steffens, his new friend, to whom I felt certain
he would want to show these , . . chapters." 22 The loss of
four years' production the suitcase held sketches that
went back as far as the months in Michigan in 1919 was
a shocking blow to Hemingway. His own shock was shared
by his wife. "No amount of sleuthing ever brought the
valise to light," she said in 19^2, "and so deeply had Ernest
put himself into this writing that I think he never recovered
from the pain of this irreparable loss."

A Christmas holiday in Switzerland, however, was a
delightful interlude, even if its prelude were a catastrophe.
After ten days of skiing and bobsledding in the mountains,
Hemingway returned to Lausanne in January, 1923. He
continued his work for Universal, but he also wrote and
mailed to Toronto two long articles about the conference.
They were good dispatches, in which he again displayed
his gifts as an interviewer. In effect, however, the stories
were more than interviews the one with Mussolini, the
other with Tchitcherin for in them he included detail,
impressions, and evaluations of the conference as a whole.
The pair of Daily Star articles formed a kind of two-install-
ment assessment of the entire episode.

LAUSANNE 197

IV.

The first of Hemingway's Lausanne dispatches was pub-
lished in Toronto on January 27, 192 B. 23 The interview
with Mussolini was almost exactly two thousand words
long. It appeared on the center of page eleven, its three
columns fanned beneath four banks of headlines and around
a good-sized photograph of the Italian politician. Before he
dealt with Mussolini, however, Hemingway summed up
his memories of the conference. His exposition was subjec-
tive and lively. He used analogies from his own past as well
as from literature and history.

"In the Chateau de Ouchy," he began, "which is so ugly
that it makes the Odd Fellows' Hall of Petoskey, Michigan
look like the Parthenon, are held the sessions of the Laus-
anne Conference." He reminded his readers that in the
nineteenth century Ouchy had been "a little fishing village
of weather-stained houses, a white-painted, pleasant inn
with a shady front porch where Byron used to sit resting
his bad leg on a chair while he looked out across the blue
of Lake Geneva and waited for the supper bell to ring, and
an old ruined tower that rose out of the reeds at the edge
of the lake." As always, Hemingway's ironic eye caused
him to take a closer look at the contemporary Ouchy.

"The Swiss," he continued, "have torn down the fishing
buildings, nailed up a tablet on the inn front porch, hustled
Byron's chair into a museum, filled in the reedy shore with
dirt from the excavations that cover the slope up the hill
to Lausanne, and built the ugliest building in Europe around
the old tower." Hemingway's sense of place, as his novels
in particular indicate, is an acute one. The erasure of sig-
nificant landmarks has not only pained him for the loss of
beauty, but also often destroyed, in his judgment, one of
the valid instruments by which a writer may retain the
truth of a given period or association. He has felt this more

198 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

deeply in terms of his personal typography, so to speak,
than even in such a vanished symbol as Childe Harold's
tower. "You need local knowledge," he once said, "and
to have seen the hill before the bull-dozer hit it. You need
to have fished the stream before they put in the dam for
the irrigation project/' 24 What has happened to Oak Park
and Kansas City and New York is only slightly more offen-
sive to him than what had been done to Lausanne since the
departure of Byron. "This building . . . ," Hemingway con-
tinued for the Daily Star, "resembles one of the love-nests
that sauerkraut kings used to build along the Rhine before
the war as dream-homes for their sauerkraut queens."

He brought his impressionism closer to the conference
itself. "You can tell when the Conference is in session," he
wrote, "by the rows of limousines parked along the Chateau
facing the lake." Hemingway dramatized the moment when
the Russians left their hotel. "A taxi comes up to the door
and Arrens, the Cheka man and Bolshevist press agent,
comes out, his heavy, dark face sneering and his one roving
eye shooting away out of control; he is followed by
Rakovsky and Tchitcherin." Hemingway had talked to
Tchitcherin in Genoa, ten months before, and he made a
vivid estimate of the changes that had occurred in the
Soviet Foreign Minister. "Tchitcherin is not as he was at
Genoa when he seemed to blink at the world as a man who
has come out of darkness into too strong sunlight. He is
more confident now, has a new overcoat, and a better
groomed look; he has been living well in Berlin, and his
face is fuller, although he looks the same as ever in profile
with his wispy red beard and mustache and his furtive, old
clothes man slouch."

Hemingway's intention was to sketch a gallery of the
conference's major personalities. The story's headlines
emphasized this; one phrase, beneath several heads about
Mussolini, simply promised: "OTHER CHARACTERS." Hem-

LAUSANNE 199

ingway turned to the Turkish delegation. His brief, careful
portrait of Turkey's chief delegate maintained the imagi-
native selectivity of his characterization of Tchitcherin.
"Everyone wants to see Ismet Pasha, but once they have
seen him they have no desire to see him again. ... I think
the solution is that Ismet has a good movie face. I have seen
him, in pictures, look stern, commanding, forceful and, in
a way, handsome. Anyone who has seen in real life the
weak, petulant face of any one of a dozen movie stars who
look beautiful on the screen, knows what I mean. Ismet's
face is not weak or petulant, it is simply plain and char-
acterless."

Ismet's final function in the dispatch was to prepare the
reader for the portrait of the man who presented such a
contrast to the Turk. Hemingway's sketch of Mussolini
went beyond mere instinctive distaste. It was extremely
hostile. He documented his hostility both by anecdote and
by amateur psychoanalysis; he declared himself immedi-
ately. "Mussolini," Hemingway wrote, "is the biggest bluff
in Europe." He varied his attack with a crescendo of fact,
ridicule, and psychological abuse. "Get hold of a good
photograph of Signor Mussolini some time," he urged, "and
study it."

You will see the weakness in his mouth which forces him
to scowl the famous Mussolini scowl that is imitated by
every 19 year old Fascisto in Italy. Study his past record.
. . . Study his genius for clothing small ideas in big words.
Study his propensity for duelling. Really brave men do not
have to fight duels, and many cowards duel constantly to
make themselves believe they are brave. And then look at
his black shirt and his white spats. There is something
wrong, even histrionically, with a man who wears white
spats with a black shirt.

200 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Hemingway was skeptical of the currently fashionable
comparisons between Mussolini and Napoleon. He argued,
"after an intimate study of the subject," that the better paral-
lel was with a much more ludicrous and inglorious figure.
Hemingway's contemporary analogy was to Horatio Bot-
tomley, an English financier who had been convicted in
London in 1922 for the misuse of public funds and sen-
tenced to seven years in prison. 25 Like Mussolini, Bottomley
was intensely patriotic. He had once described himself as
"the King's chief recruiting agent in the war." Like Musso-
lini, too, he had been both jingoistic politician and journalist;
at the time of his conviction Bottomley was a Member of
Parliament, and he had also been for many years owner
and editor of John Bull, England's most nationalistic maga-
zine. His reputation in Parliament was as a demagogue of
extraordinary eloquence.

Hemingway, on the other hand, did not underestimate
Mussolini's strength. "It isn't really Bottomley, though,"
he concluded. "Bottomley was a fool. Mussolini isn't a fool
and he is a great organizer." As in his earlier articles on
Italian fascism, Hemingway had shown a premature under-
standing of its quality and menace. His attitude toward
Mussolini was not characteristic of most American journal-
ists of the period. 20 The entire interview, and the position
it represents in Hemingway's twenty-three-year-old evalu-
ation of political morality, is a reminder of his indignation
many years later when Archibald MacLeish cited him as
one of America's literary irresponsibles. "Having fought
fascism in every place that I know how," Hemingway said
in 1940, "in the places where you could really fight it, I
have no remorse neither literary nor political." 27

His response to Tchitcherin, spokesman for another to-
talitarianism, was less hostile, and for good reasons. The
article Hemingway mailed to the Daily Star on January 25
made these reasons clear. 28 Tchitcherin, he felt, had none

LAUSANNE 201

of the Italian's mean viciousness and pretense. He neither
charmed nor repelled Hemingway; he interested the young
reporter as he might have interested William Bolitho, as a
problem in character that might be solved by independent
analysis. Hemingway found the key in Tchitcherin's ironic
antecedents as a Russian aristocrat. He supplemented this
with one of the historical parallels by which, probably
under the influence of the widely read Bolitho, he was in-
creasingly attempting to clarify his journalism. "Tchitcherin
was an old Czarist diplomat, and if Lenin is the Napoleon
that made a dictatorship out of the Russian revolution,
Tchitcherin is his Talleyrand."

Tchitcherin's position as foreign minister enabled Hem-
ingway to deal comprehensively with the Soviet relation-
ships to other nations. He enlivened with paragraphs of
dialogue what could have degenerated into a dull lecture;
the conversation had the lucid conviction of the professional
diplomat. It was the contest between Tchitcherin and Lord
Curzon, Hemingway maintained, "that made the Lausanne
Conference so interesting." He spoke of it as a conflict
"between the British Empire and the future Russian Em-
pire with Curzon, a tall, cold, icicle of a man holding the
whip hand with the British fleet, and Tchitcherin fighting,
fighting, with arguments, historical instances, facts, statistics
and impassioned pleas and finally, seeing it was hopeless,
simply talking for history, registering his objections for
future generations to read. . . ."

The remainder of the dispatch was a return to the inti-
mate portraiture at which Hemingway was becoming ex-
pert. Like the Mussolini interview, this second Lausanne
story was illustrated, in this case by two photographs, each
one showing Tchitcherin in the gaudy uniform of a Soviet
general. This was the motif of Hemingway's final para-
graphs. "Tchitcherin, you must know," Hemingway ex-
plained, "has never been a soldier. He is timid personally.

202 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

He does not fear assassination, but he would turn pale if
you shook your fist under his nose. Until he was twelve
years old his mother kept him in dresses." Hemingway
described the astonishment of a group of reporters who
saw the two photographs displayed in a Lausanne shop.

"They're faked/' one man said. "Why he's never had a
uniform on in his life."

We all looked closely at the photographs.

"Nope. They're not faked." Some one said: "I can tell.
They're not faked. Let's go and ask Slocombe."

The newspapermen found George Slocombe, "the cor-
respondent of the London Daily Herald, who is Tchit-
cherin's very good friend and sometimes his mouthpiece,"
sitting in the press room of the Palace Hotel. Hemingway
had known the Englishman since March, when they had
covered the Genoa Conference and visited Max Beerbohm.
Slocombe explained that all the Soviet commissars were
automatically generals in the Red Army, and that Tchit-
cherin had proudly ordered the uniform in Berlin. Hem-
ingway finished the Lausanne chapter of his Near East
assignment on this ironic note. "The boy who was kept in
dresses until he was twelve years old always wanted to be
a soldier. And soldiers make empires, and empires make
wars." The assignment as a whole, extending from Con-
stantinople in September through the Greek retreat and
the Thracian refugees in October, including as it did the
close contact with the conference in November, Decem-
ber, and January, and embracing the personal relationships
with Bolitho and Steffens, was an important episode in his
European apprenticeship. He had a chance to digest and
assess it and a chance also to measure his reactions against
another bright, inquiring mind. He and his wife went to
Rapallo and spent several days with Ezra Pound.

LAUSANNE 203

The atmosphere was completely different from Lausanne,
save for the superficial resemblance between Pound and
Bolitho. It was dominated by Pound's lively energy; it in-
cluded such men as Michael Strater, the artist who had
recently done the drawings for Pound's first sixteen cantos,
and Robert McAlmon, whose Three Mountains Press had
published the book. The artistic and literary intensity of
the colony was enlivened by such restless expatriates as
Nancy Cunard. Hemingway played tennis with Pound and
Strater, and he discussed writing with McAlmon, and,
McAlmon remembered later, "he talked of Sherwood
Anderson, Harriet Monroe, and Gertrude Stein." 29 Hem-
ingway explained to McAlmon that most of his manu-
scripts had just been lost, but that he still had some short
stories. McAlmon, the most active of the expatriate pub-
lishers, told Hemingway to send them to him in Paris. This
was the origin of Hemingway's first published collection,
Three Stories & Ten Poems, which McAlmon brought out
later in the year. 30 From Rapallo the Hemingways went up
to the Dolomites. They stayed at Cortina D'Ampezzo for
several weeks. In April their skiing was interrupted by
another of John Bone's cables.

CHAPTER

THE R UHR

"You have to keep in touch with
[history] at the time and you can
depend on just as much as you have
actually seen and followed."

ERNEST HEMINGWAY*

Hemingway's assignments from John Bone became pro-
gressively more desirable throughout his tenure as the Star's
staff correspondent in Europe. Now, in April, 1923, he re-
ceived a particularly important one. His series of articles
on the French occupation of the Ruhr was the most elab-
orate single undertaking of the long apprenticeship which
began in Oak Park, on the Trapeze, in 1916, and ended in
Toronto on December 31, 1923. In the scope he gave to it
the Ruhr series compared creditably with his newspaper
work as a mature writer in Spain in 1937, in the Orient in
1941, and in England and France in 1944. 2

Hemingway made of the Ruhr assignment a sound piece
of political reporting. He went beyond Bone's conception
of him as a clever feature writer whose special forte was
vivid impressionism and skeptical exposure. The series was
tangible evidence of his personal growth and of his respon-
sive debt to such disparate influences as Gertrude Stein and
William Bolitho. His approach and treatment retained few
remnants of the provincialism that had limited the breadth
of certain Star Weekly stories and of his report on the

THE RUHR 205

Black Forest trip in August, 1922. He did more than rise
to the serious requirements of the new assignment; he had
developed sufficiently to give it dimensions John Bone had
not visualized. The managing editor, indeed, took advan-
tage of his pre-publication reading of the first three articles
to insert some publicity in the Star Weekly about the forth-
coming Daily Star series. On the same day the first dispatch
was printed there appeared in the weekend supplement a
full column called "Something About Ernest M. Heming-
way, Who Is Taking the Lid Off Europe." 3 The column
included more than a dozen paragraphs, some of them deal-
ing with the series, others discussing Hemingway's colorful
biography. Readers were urged to follow "these intensely
interesting articles."

The occupation of the Ruhr was a melancholy spectacle,
one further testimonial to the waste and failure of the war
and its treaties. Hemingway was able to make good use of
the political instruction and experience he had received at
Lausanne. He was compelled to translate Bolitho's lectures
into a working pattern of expository analysis. His basic
approach was a measure of the thoughtfulness with which
he was attempting to communicate a catastrophe whose
ramifications extended beyond the German frontiers. Hem-
ingway did not merely catch the first train for Cologne.
He wrote in Paris three introductory articles defining the
situation and its antecedents. He explained his premise in
the opening paragraphs of his first story, datelined from the
French capital on April 3 and printed in Toronto eleven
days later. 4

"To write about Germany," he began, "you must begin
by writing about France." This was a reminder of a quality
Miss Stein detected in him the previous year; she found him
a studious young man. His series of articles on the Franco-
German situation, as it was billed in the Daily Star, demon-
strated a thorough, investigative quality. His first European

206 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

correspondence, in early 1922, was not unlike the material
enterprising American undergraduates used to send back to
their home-town newspaper during a summer trip. He was
more gifted than most of the young string correspondents
who wandered across the Continent in the decades between
the wars, but his initial strength, like theirs, had been the
ingenuous transcription of the novelties he was encounter-
ing. Now, at only twenty-three, he had become sufficiently
literate to expand his facility into a larger vision without
losing the freshness and without becoming ponderous in
his new knowledge. "There is a magic in the name France,"
Hemingway continued in the opening paragraph. "It is a
rnagic like the smell of the sea or the sight of blue hills or
of soldiers marching by. It is a very old magic." His idiom
and point of view were personal and imaginative. His new
skills had not yet made him a journalistic hack. "France,"
he wrote, "is a broad and lovely country." He did not hesi-
tate to use emotionalism. "The loveliest country that I
know. It is impossible to write impartially about a country
when you love it."

His tone established, Hemingway shifted to his principal
theme. "But it is possible," he said, "to write impartially
about the government of that country." He stated his un-
dertaking and its genesis. "France refused in 1917 to make
a peace without victory. Now she finds that she has a
victory without peace. To understand why this is so we
must take a look at the French government." It was in this
way that Hemingway launched the series, with a few lines
of evocative prose, an epigrammatic summary of the central
events of the recent past, and a touch of journalistically
useful didacticism. The rest of the article was a lucid
resume of the contemporary alignment of French political
parties. Hemingway ended this first installment with a
promise of exciting revelations. "... the sinister tale that is
unfolding day by day in the French chamber of deputies

THE RUHR 207

about how Poincare was forced into the Ruhr, against his
own will and judgment, [and] the strange story of the rise
of the royalists in France and their influence on the present
government will be told in the next article."

The initial dispatch, like all the articles in the series, had
been long and detailed, but Hemingway gave his summary
of essentially stale material an illusion of fresh exposure.
Less expert and glossy, it had nevertheless a kind of pre-
Time flow and vigor, with the same oversimplification of
political complexities. Its two thousand words were spread
out by the Daily Star beneath a four-column double banner
and three banks of smaller headlines. It was illustrated with
a panel of five of the politicians Hemingway discussed. It
was further dignified by an editorial paragraph announcing
it as the first of a series and by a note at the end in which
the editor paraphrased Hemingway's own last paragraph.
"In the next article/' the reader was told, "to be published
on Wednesday next, Mr. Hemingway will describe the
amazing growth and power of the Royalist party in
France."

John Bone intended to handle the series as in every way
a feature of his newspaper. The second article was run in
the paper's most prominent position, as the lead story in
page one's seventh and eighth columns. 5 Hemingway's es-
sentially romantic temperament had responded to the ap-
parent drama of this republican paradox of a modern
royalist party. Its famous names, mysterious power, and its
echoes of past glories had for expatriates something of the
more remote glamor of the Stuart dynasty. Hemingway's
romanticism, however, which had made the Black Forest
such a disappointment to him, was in this series rarely more
than one of the contributive elements in his point of view.
His sense of realism allowed him to detect the uglier aspects
of the royalist group. Stylistically, to be sure, his quickened
sensibility was reflected in the brisk, colloquial idiom, live-

208 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Her and more dramatic than the measured, academic expo-
sition of the first article, but his systematic debunking
included an attack on the royalist leader, Leon Daudet, and
an implicitly hostile description of their papist coloration.

Hemingway's profile of the due d'Orleans was less
frankly unfriendly, but there was nothing in his description
of the royalist claimant that made Philippe seem a well
qualified candidate. "Philippe," Hemingway wrote drily,
"lives in England, is a big, good looking man and rides very
well to hounds." It was in his paragraphs about the party's
hoodlums that Hemingway thoroughly destroyed the illu-
sion of a gallant noble cause.

There is a royal fascist! called the Camelots du Roi. They
carry black, loaded canes with salmon colored handles and
at twilight you can see them in Montmartre swaggering
along the streets with their canes, a little way ahead and be-
hind a newsboy who is crying U Action Frangaise in the
radical quarter of the old Butte.

Hemingway reminded his readers that French politics
were unlike those of any other nation. "It is a very intimate
politics, a politics of scandal." The long article, illustrated
with photographs of Daudet and Philippe, and a facsimile
of V Action Frangaise's masthead, ended with Hemingway's
blunt citation of a 1922 interview in which Poincare had
assured the press that France would never occupy the Ruhr.
"Meantime," Hemingway concluded, without interpretive
comment, "the French government has spent 160 million
francs (official) on the occupation and Ruhr coal is costing
France $200 a ton." Again the editor precised the next
dispatch. "In the next article Mr. Hemingway will deal
with the French press, telling how the papers are paid to
print only what the government wants."

The third article was a natural sequel to the analysis of

THE RUHR 209

the royalists, for Hemingway now made it clear that sub-
scribers to U Action Fran ^aise were at least getting more
than official hand-outs. 6 This was not the case with the
average reader of a French paper. "What," Hemingway
asked in his lead, "do the French people think about the
Ruhr and the whole German question? You will not find
out by reading the French press." This anomaly, by To-
ronto standards, was the theme of the third dispatch, which
continued the bi-weekly schedule of the series; the first
article had been published on a Saturday, the second on the
following Wednesday, and now the discussion of the
French press appeared three days later, on Saturday, April
21. Like its predecessor, it had been the subject of advance
comment in the Star Weekly. "Did you know," a para-
graph of advertisement had run, "that all European govern-
ments have a special fund for newspaper publicity that does
not have to be accounted for?" 7 Like its predecessor, too, it
was again the front page feature.

Hemingway's revelation for his Toronto audience was
as blunt as possible. "French newspapers," he declared, "sell
their news columns just as they do their advertising space."
He tried to be detached in his exposition, but some cynicism
was inevitable. "As a matter of fact," he wrote, "it is not
considered very chic to advertise in the small advertising
section of a French daily. The news item is supposed to be
the only real way of advertising." Hemingway explained
the process of subsidy and emphasized that the reader of
every metropolitan daily found only such governmental
news as the government chose to print. He applied this situ-
ation to the Ruhr occupation. "When the government has
any special news ... it pays the papers extra. If any of
these enormously circulated daily papers refuses to print
the government news or criticizes the government stand-
point, the government withdraws their subsidy and the
paper loses its biggest advertiser. Consequently the big

210 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Paris dailies are always for the government, any govern-
ment that happens to be in."

The resume of France's position had demonstrated his
capacity for assessing and communicating a large block of
material. The writing itself had never equaled the terse
artistry of some of his Near East dispatches, which for the
moment remained the best instances of his journalism as a
technical transition toward fiction. Neither, on the other
hand, had there been in these three Paris dispatches any
of the excess of some of the work that preceded the Con-
stantinople assignment. The articles indicate that he was
achieving a maturity of attitude and self-control without
which he would have remained merely one more talented
young reporter.

Above all the articles demonstrated his understanding of
and identification with a nation not his own. The Sun Also
Rises, begun two years later, would display a calm utiliza-
tion of the European background, more effective than the
heady, artistically confusing sense of exoticism that blurred
many American treatments of an expatriate experience. The
extent of his feeling for Paris, implicit in these three articles,
permitted Hemingway to write of it in his novel without a
labored crescendo of repetitive discovery. Paris, he said
later, "was a fine place to be quite young in and it is a
necessary part of a man's education." 8 In April, 1923, his
Paris education already allowed him to write of the city
with restraint.

The material itself had been neither profound nor revo-
lutionary; it was available to any observant newspaperman.
The consistent fusing of observation and interest and stu-
diousness into a well-balanced support of his talent was
nevertheless an important progression. The progression was
particularly noticeable when Hemingway in the subsequent
installments returned to the same scenes from which eight

THE RUHR 211

months earlier had come the indifferent Black Forest re-
ports.

The seven articles dealing with Germany got off to an
inauspicious start. The Daily Star mishandled the sequence,
breaking the pattern Hemingway was building. His plan
had been to begin his survey of Germany with Offenburg,
the southernmost limit of the French occupation. He him-
self followed the scheme, and his first two dispatches, the
fourth and fifth of the series, were datelined from the
Baden railroad town. The Daily Star, however, jumbled the
first three German dispatches in such a way that the second
Offenburg story, chronologically speaking, was printed on
April 25, a story from Frankfurt appeared on the following
Saturday, and the first Offenburg article, describing the trip
from Paris to Strasbourg and ending as Hemingway
boarded the train for Offenburg, was printed on Wednes-
day, May 2. The paper offered on that date a partial
apology which confirms Hemingway's deliberate sequen-
tial intent.

It was merely one further professional vexation, of a kind
that had been anticipated by the paper's cavalier treatment
of his interviews with Mussolini and Clemenceau, and by
its complaints, on another occasion, when he wrote pro-
phetically and pessimistically about the German post-war
currency. 9 The copy desk's carelessness broke the func-
tional plan by which Hemingway was going to follow the
international railway line from Offenburg to Karlsruhe to
Frankfurt, on to Cologne and Diisseldorf. The plan had a
neat simplicity, for the route not only carried the reader
through the heart of the occupied region, but it also auto-
matically clarified the occupation's failure. France's inabil-
ity to keep the transportation artery flowing was a measure
of her inability to make the occupation fruitful. Rearranged

212 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

into their intended pattern, the two Offenburg dispatches
give an effective picture of the process of getting to Ger-
many and of the initial German scene.

The fourth article, indeed, employed a treatment dif-
ferent from the one Hemingway used in his three intro-
ductory dispatches. 10 His first responsibility had been to
inform; the treatment had been objective and undramatic.
Now, however, his goal was mood and atmosphere. His
treatment became scenic and dramatic. It was excellent
training for a fictionalist; it was an exercise in the relation-
ship between theme and style. The article also demon-
strated a narrative control which permitted Hemingway to
increase the story pace toward an episodic climax whose
implications remained in the reader's mind without anti-
climax as the dispatch ended. Even the carefully contrived
gerunds are reminders that these had been the months of
his increasing association with Gertrude Stein. "In the cold,
grey, street-washing, milk-delivering, shutters-coming-off-
the-shops, early morning," he wrote, "the midnight train
from Paris arrived in Strasbourg."

In the border town Hemingway had his first glimpse of
the effects of the occupation. There were no trains running
from Strasbourg into Germany. He took the tram, observ-
ing closely the pictorial quality of the scene. "There is a
great deal of description," Miss Stein had said of his early
work, "and not very good description." Now his descrip-
tion was much improved, its composition linear and im-
mediate. "There were sharp peaked plastered houses
criss-crossed with great wooden beams, the river wound
and rewound through the town and each time we crossed it
there were fishermen on the banks, there was the wide
modern street with modern German shops with big glass
show windows and new French names over their doors . . .
a long stream of carts was coming in to market from the
country, streets were being flushed and washed." Heming-

THE RUHR 213

way was trying to see each composition with a painter's
vision; each new paragraph contained a central object for
the eye. To this he was beginning to add tonal quality of
sensation and statement.

In the stretch of country that lies between Strasbourg
and the Rhine the tram track runs along a canal and a big
blunt nosed barge with LUSITANIA painted on its stern
was being dragged smoothly along by two horses ridden
by the bargeman's two children while breakfast smoke
came out of the galley chimney and the bargeman leaned
against the sweep. It was a nice morning.

Hemingway was cleared by the customs inspector and
walked down the road to the Kehl station. He wandered
out to the track and discovered four French soldiers, "of
the 170th Infantry Regiment, with full kit and fixed bay-
onets." The indirect dialogue was a prophecy of the slick
finish he gave to The Sun Also Rises in 1926 through pre-
cisely the same device. "One of them told me there would
be a train at 11:15 for Offenburg, a military tram; it was
about half an hour to Offenburg, but this droll train
would get there about two o'clock. He grinned. Monsieur
was from Paris? What did monsieur think about the match
Criqui-Zjawnny Kilbane? Ah. He had thought very much
the same. He had always had the idea he was no fool, this
Kilbane. The military service? Well, it was all the same. It
made no difference where one did it. In two months now he
would be through. It was a shame he was not free, perhaps
we could have a talk together. Monsieur had seen this Kil-
bane box? The new wine was not bad at the buffet. But
after all he was on guard. The buffet is straight down the
corridor. If monsieur leaves the baggage here it will be all
right."

Hemingway made the buffet the story's climax. Every-

214 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

thing in the dispatch had been a preparation for this. There
was a neat balance by which the waiter became the major
character, supplemented by the tableau-like figures who
drifted in and out of the restaurant. Hemingway did not
reproduce with dull fidelity all the scene or its speech; his
selective condensation was completely a device of the short
story rather than the conventional feature article. It is the
technique as well as the milieu which remind us of so many
of the episodes and structures of his early fiction.

In the buffet was a sad-looking waiter in a dirty shirt . . .
a long bar and two forty-year-old French second lieuten-
ants sitting at a table in the corner. I bowed as I entered,
and they both saluted.

"No," the waiter said, "there is no milk. You can have
black coffee, but it is ersatz coffee. The beer is good."

The waiter sat down at the table. "No, there is no one
here now," he said. "All the people you say you saw in
July cannot come now. The French will not give them
passports to come into Germany."

"How do they get along with the French here in town?"

"No trouble. They are good people. Just like us. Some
of them are nasty sometimes, but they are good people.
Nobody hates, except profiteers. They had something to
lose. We haven't had any fun since 1914. If you make any
money it gets no good, and there is only to spend it. That
is what we do. Some day it will be over. I don't know how.
Last year I had enough money saved up to buy a gasthaus
in Hernberg; now that money wouldn't buy four bottles of
champagne."

Hemingway preserved the scene's strength by ending
the dispatch quickly, but without an abruptness that would
have thrown the buffet vignette out of focus. "There was a
shrill peep of a whistle outside. I paid and shook hands with

THE RUHR 215

the waiter, saluted the two forty-year-old second lieuten-
ants, who were now playing checkers at their table, and
went out to take the military train to Offenburg."

The fifth article picked up this narrative thread with easy
consistency. 11 "Offenburg," his lead began, "is the southern
limit of the French occupation of Germany. It is a clean,
neat little town with the hills of the Black Forest rising on
one side and the Rhine plain stretching off on the other."
Hemingway was impressed by the calm solidarity of the
German resistance. He had talked to many natives; he re-
produced these conversations in his dispatches without any
of the earlier, Black Forest series' arch references to his
awkward German. They had all told him of their personal
debt to the government, which supported the unemployed
with public funds. He hitch-hiked from Offenburg to Or-
tenberg, where there was a north-bound train service. The
article's final passage was an account of the ride he got on
a motor truck.

His treatment here had the same forcefully creative
quality that had distinguished the initial Offenburg dis-
patch. Detached from the long expository introduction
about the railroad problem, these paragraphs were a self-
sufficient sketch, five or six hundred words of the narrative
and portraiture he later achieved in such early published
vignettes as "The Revolutionist." The opening paragraph
was blunt and careful, wholly in the structural idiom of his
later fiction. "The driver was a short, blonde German with
sunken cheeks and faded blue eyes. He had been badly
gassed at the Somme. We were riding along a white, dusty
road through green fields forested with hop poles, their
tangled wires flopping. We crossed a wide, swift, clearly
pebbled stream with a flock of geese resting on a gravel
island. A manure spreader was busily clicking in the field.
In the distance were the blue Schwartzwald hills." There
was no break between these opening lines of the sketch and

216 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

its immediate extension by authentic, stylized paragraphs of
unadorned, functional dialogue.

"My brother," said the driver, guiding the big wheel
with one arm half wrapped around it. "He had hard luck."

"So?"

"Ja. He never had no luck, my brother."

"What was he doing?"

"He was signal man on the railroad from Kehl. The
French put him out. All the signal men. The day they came
to OfFenburg, they gave them all twenty-four hours."

"But the government pays him, doesn't it?"

"Oh yes. They pay him. But he can't live on it."

"What's the matter?"

"Well, he's got seven kids. . . . They pay him what he
got, but the prices are up and where he was signal man he
had a little garden. It makes a difference when you got a
garden."

"What's he do now?" I asked.

"He tried working in the sawmill at Hausach, but he
can't work good inside. He's got the gas like me. Ja. He's
got no luck, my brother."

Taken together in this way, with the sketches and vi-
gnettes isolated from the firm but conventional exposition,
the two OfFenburg articles represented a new creativity in
Hemingway's journalism. His apprenticeship was nearly
completed; certainly it was entering its final phase. He was
beginning to be able to do occasionally, even under the in-
hibitions of his journalistic medium, what he would soon do
with regularity in the steady production of short stories
during the first few years of his professional career.

That his apprenticeship was not wholly completed, how-
ever, was demonstrated by the sixth German dispatch. 12
Datelined from Frankfurt-on-Main, and designed to follow

THE RUHR 217

the second Offenburg article, it was not in any way the
equal of its pair of predecessors. The Trapeze-style wit was
full of condescension for his audience, his talent, and his
material. The tone itself was in many ways a return to the
juvenile belligerence of his 1922 Black Forest series. The
idiom and point of view, as well as the careless style and
structure, had the same glib facility and the broad, spoiled
wit.

Then we talked about the war. I asked the [brave Bel-
gian] lady if she had been in Belgium during the occupa-
tion.

"Yes," she said.

"How was it? Pretty bad?" I asked.

The B.B. lady snorted, her most powerful Belgian snort.
"I did not suffer at all."

I believe her. In fact, having traveled with the brave Bel-
gian lady, I am greatly surprised and unable to understand
how the Germans ever got into Belgium at all.

The seventh dispatch, mailed from Mainz on April 22,
was more reassuring. 13 It established that the quality of the
Offenburg articles had not been a fluke. The opening sec-
tion was mainly expository. Hemingway used a cross-
section survey to vivify and document the impact of
inflation upon the German people. He described the night
he spent in a luxury hotel, in order to "investigate how the
profiteers lived," and he recounted too the fluctuations of
prices from town to town along his route. During the
previous week, "investigating the actual living conditions,"
he had talked to a small factory owner, several workmen, a
hotel keeper, and a high school professor. He recorded a
long paragraph of dialogue from the first three citizen-
groups, but his strongest emphasis was on the teacher.

There were three paragraphs of detailed and informative

218 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

speech by the white collar representative, paralleling those
by the other witnesses; then, in the closing lines of the dis-
patch, Hemingway once again became the creative writer
rather than the journalist. The final section was another of
the notable internal sketches he began in Kehl.

"But how will it all come out?" I asked him.

"We can only trust in God," he said. Then he smiled.
"We used to trust in God and the government, we Ger-
mans. Now I no longer trust the government."

"I heard you playing very beautifully on the flute when
I came to the door," I said, rising to go.

"You know the flute? You like the flute? I will play for
you."

So we sat in the dusk in the ugly little parlor and the
schoolmaster played very beautifully on the flute. Outside
people were going by in the main street of the town. The
children came in silently and sat down. After a time the
schoolmaster stopped and stood up very embarrassedly.

"It is a very nice instrument, the flute," he said.

Hemingway mailed his next dispatch from Cologne, five
days later. 14 The Daily Star printed it on May 9, still main-
taining the Wednesday-Saturday cycle of publication. The
article contained none of the careful, semi-fictional vi-
gnettes that were making the series so clearly a transitional
step toward his creative work, but, at the same time, it was
an expository enlargement of the sketch about the high
school professor. There was real distress in Hemingway's
reaction to the acute suffering which accompanied infla-
tion; it reaffirmed the fact that a basis of the evocative
sketches was his new capacity to respond without restric-
tive prejudice.

"There are no beggars," he wrote. "No horrible exam-
ples on view. No visible famine sufferers nor hungry chil-

THE RUHR 219

dren that besiege the railway stations." Hemingway stressed
this paradox of national well being. "The tourist leaves Ger-
many," he maintained, "wondering what all this starving
business is about. The country looks prosperous." He
bluntly stated the reality. "For every ten professional beg-
gars in Italy," he wrote bitterly, "there are a hundred
amateur starvers in Germany." He defined this poignant
conception. "An amateur starver does not starve in public."
As the dispatch ended, the briefest of the series, Heming-
way's newly powerful impulse toward artistic composition
displayed itself tentatively. "In the evening," he noted, "the
brilliant red or the dark blue of the officer's formal mess kit
that is compulsory for those officers who dine in Cologne,
colors the drab civilian crowds. Outside in the street Ger-
man children dance on the pavement to the music that
comes from the windows of the ball room of the officers'
club."

This vestige of the Offenburg and Mainz sketches was
the final appearance of any memorable writing in the series.
As always during his newspaper career, Hemingway's best
effects depended on the extent of his response to his ma-
terial; the response was given with increasing reluctance,
and it invariably perished quickly. His ninth article illus-
trated this process. 15 His instinct for a provocative approach
was shown by his resumption of the theme of hatred in the
occupied zone; his artistic numbness restricted him to an
expository investigation of the tension. The lead was a
promise of further vignettes. "You feel the hate in the
Ruhr," he began, "as an actual concrete thing. It is as
definite as the unswept, cinder-covered sidewalks of Diis-
seldorf or the long rows of grimy brick cottages, each one
exactly like the next, where the workmen of Essen live."
He never clothed this theme, however, with anything bur
straightforward documentation through standard, un-
dramatized anecdote and political analysis. Once, briefly,

220 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

when he had been describing the momentary German unity
in the first days of the French occupation, he seemed on
the verge of something creative.

"It was most uplifting," an old German woman told me.
"You should have been here. Never have I been so uplifted
since the great days of the victories. Oh, how they sang.
Ach, it was wonderful."

Hemingway stopped there, returning to his conventional
account of the large outlines of the situation. He could
visualize sketches and vignettes in the material, as it were,
but he lacked the impulse to attempt any more creative
fragments. He was already anticipating and preparing for
the end of the series. He began to curve the material back
toward France and the themes of his three introductory
articles. "The end of the Ruhr venture," he concluded,
"looks very near."

The final dispatch of the series, as well as the manner of
its publication, testified with painful clarity to Heming-
way's loss of interest in the assignment. 16 John Bone had
been able to promise and maintain the Wednesday-Saturday
cycle of publication only as long as Hemingway mailed the
articles regularly. When the managing editor printed the
ninth dispatch, however, on Saturday, May 12, he could
not pledge, as before, that its sequel would appear on the
following Wednesday. He hadn't received it. Bone could
merely assert that "the tenth will be published in a few
days." 17 When the tenth article did arrive in Toronto, date-
lined from Diisseldorf on May 5, Bone printed it promptly
and was able to preserve the bi-weekly sequence. Again,
however, he had no assurance to its successor, for the
prefatory note on May 16 simply said once more that "the
next will be published in a few days." 18 At this point Hem-
ingway suddenly wound up the assignment; no further

THE RUHR 221

articles were printed, although Bone clearly anticipated at
least an eleventh story.

The last dispatch, therefore, was not a clear-cut terminal
article. It had the same aura of imminent completion as the
first Diisseldorf story, but there was no deliberate summa-
tion. As before, Hemingway continued to see the material
in terms of dramatic sketches; as before, he never permitted
them to materialize. Some of his paragraphs, as he left the
Ruhr assignment, were virtually a first draft of what he
was visualizing, reminders again that his apprenticeship was
ending, and containing all the elements of brief, effective
vignettes save final execution.

Hiking along the road that runs through the dreary brick
outskirts of Diisseldorf out into the pleasant open country
that rolls in green swells patched with timber between the
smoky towns of the Ruhr, you pass slow-moving French
ammunition carts, the horses led by short, blue-uniformed,
quiet-faced Chinamen, their tin hats on the back of their
heads. . . . French cavalry patrols ride by. Two broad-faced
Westphalian iron puddlers who are sitting under a tree and
drawing their unemployment pay watch the cavalry out of
sight around a bend of the road.

I borrowed a match from one of the iron puddlers. They
are Westphalians, hard-headed, hard-muscled, uncivil and
friendly. They want to go snipe shooting. The snipe have
just come with the spring, but they haven't any shot guns.
They laugh at the little Indo-Chinamen with their ridicu-
lous big, blue helmets on the back of their heads and they
applaud one little Annamite who has gotten way behind
the column and is trotting along to catch up, holding his
horse's bridle, sweat running down his face, his helmet jog-
gling down over his eyes. The little Annamite smiles hap-
pily.

222 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Hemingway left Germany as soon as he had mailed that
tenth dispatch. He had spent six weeks on the assignment
and written almost twenty thousand words. As journalism,
his treatment had been invariably competent, occasionally
excellent; as prose, the treatment had been frequently pro-
vocative and in several instances so good as to make certain
dispatches memorable. He had shown genuine vocational
dexterity, handling with poise an assignment that could
have developed in a cheap and hackneyed pattern.

For the first time, too, his newspaper writing could be
accurately described as an undeniable indication of his
talent and development as a creative writer. In spite of its
ambiguous conclusion, the series confirmed and enlarged
the managing editor's regard for him. "An important ad-
dition even to the Lloyd George articles," one of the blurbs
had said, referring to a current series by the former prime
minister, "are those by Hemingway, who is well known to
thousands of Daily Star readers. His close-up pictures of
Mussolini and Tchitcherin, his despatches from Genoa,
Constantinople, and Rapallo, where he was sent by The
Star, were followed by [sic] intense interest." 19

John Bone had printed six of the ten articles on the front
page of the Daily Star. Three of the remaining four ap-
peared on the important page one of the second section,
and the other, the initial dispatch of the series, was pub-
lished on page four of the first section. None of the stories
had been buried in the back pages. Most of them were
illustrated, and they had all been both by-lined and copy-
righted. The material had been consistently featured during
a six-week period by a metropolitan daily. The advertise-
ments had stressed the reporter and his talents as much as
the contents of the series itself. "Hemingway," according
to one of Star Weekly's paragraphs, "has not only a

THE RUHR 223

genius for newspaper work, but for the short story as well.
He is an extraordinarily gifted and picturesque writer."
The next line was ironic in its implication that Hemingway
preferred to reserve his energy for his Toronto journalism.
"Besides his despatches for The Star, he writes very little
else, only two or three stories a year." 20

The Star Weekly might have added, however, that the
material profit from the German series would now enable
Hemingway to write more fiction than had been previously
possible. A month generally elapsed between the time when
the young American filed an expense account and the mo-
ment when the Star's check arrived in Paris. By the middle
of June, 1923, therefore, Hemingway was sufficiently se-
cure so that he did no further journalism that summer. He
went from Germany directly back to the Dolomites, where
he had left his wife, and they returned together to Paris.
Hemingway spent the next ten weeks on his own work.
The writing which he resumed and completed during June
and July of 1923, particularly the second project he under-
took, was wholly natural in the light of what he had occa-
sionally experimented with in the German dispatches.
While he was correcting the proofs of Three Stories & Ten
Poems, he prepared for publication the vignettes of in our
time.

CHAPTER
XI

PARIS

"Fame was what they wanted in that
town." ARCHIBALD

Hemingway encountered most of the significant experi-
ences of his personal and professional life before he was
twenty-five years old. None of these experiences was
unique in a man so young; as a cluster of episodes, how-
ever, they were premature, and pertinent in terms of the
early maturity of his style and literary attitudes. He was
barely eighteen when he began his vocation. He was not
yet nineteen when he was severely wounded in the war. At
nineteen he was the victim of an acutely unhappy love
affair. He was married at twenty-two, a father two years
later. He was a foreign correspondent when he was twenty-
two, and a month after his twenty-fourth birthday, in
August, 1923, he received his first major publication as a
creative writer.

For Hemingway publication had a significance beyond
the conventional connotations of acceptance and recogni-
tion. It hastened the abandonment of intrusive journalism.
It confirmed his talent; this was of special importance to a
temperament as competitive as his. Most important of all,
publication allowed Hemingway to complete his appren-
ticeship and initiate the proper beginnings of his artistic
career. "I am glad to have it out," he wrote Edmund Wil-

PARIS 225

son in November, 1923, three months after the appearance
of Three Stones & Ten Poems, "and once it is published
it is back of you." 2

The comment was precociously acute. Hemingway's life
and work have been deliberately and severely compart-
mentalized, displaying a chapter-like development that has
required the specific emergence from one period as a pre-
lude to entrance into its successor. "In writing," he said
many years later, during what he regarded as just such a
completion and inaugural, "I have moved through arith-
metic, through plane geometry and algebra, and now I am
in calculus." 3 He could not commence the phase of his
work which began in the summer of 1925 with the writing
of The Sun Also Rises until he had completed the material
which had its origins in his journalism and in his associa-
tions with Anderson, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. This
material, the finale of his newspaper career and the initial
compartment of his formal artistic life, included Three
Stories & Ten Poems, in our time, In Our Time, and The
Torrents of Spring. Hemingway himself has dated his work
as beginning with Three Stories & Ten Poems. "The only
work of mine that I endorse or sign as my true work," he
said in 1951, "is what I have published since Three Stories
& Ten Poems and the first In Our Time? It was an aus-
picious beginning.

The sequence of these two expatriate pamphlets, how-
ever, was not as had been planned, in our time, which dif-
fered from the 1925 In Our Time in that it contained only
the brief vignettes which function as inter-chapters be-
tween the short stories of In Our Time, was originally
scheduled to be published before the stories and verse,
"but," Hemingway once explained, "being hand printed at
Bill Bird's press and he having plenty of other things to do,
it was delayed until 1924." 4 Three Stories & Ten Poems
therefore became Hemingway's first volume. 5 Advance

226 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

copies were ready by the middle of August, 1923, printed
in Dijon and published by Robert McAlmon's Contact
Publishing Company. Hemingway was pleased to be part
of a series of books by such expatriates as Marsden Hartley,
Mina Loy, and William Carlos Williams. He sent a copy
to his family in Oak Park and another to Bill Home, and
when he got to Toronto in September, 1923, he gave sev-
eral to his friends on the Star. The copy he presented to
Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas was inscribed to them
"with love from Hemingway." Miss Stein told Heming-
way in the fall of 1923 that she had written a review of
Three Stories & Ten Poems, but the notice never ap-
peared. 6

Edmund Wilson, however, published a joint review of
it and in our time in the Dial the next year. 7 Hemingway
thus had the good fortune to receive his first American
comment from a critic wiio continued to be one of his
most sensitive interpreters. Wilson felt that in our time was
"the more important book." Most of his review was de-
voted to its vignettes and sketches. He had little to say
about the three short stories in Three Stories & Ten Poems,
save to outline the relationship between Anderson, Hem-
ingway, and Gertrude Stein. As for the verse, Wilson con-
cluded that "Mr. Hemingway's poems are not particularly
important." 8

Hemingway himself said nothing about the poetry in his
correspondence with Wilson in the fall of 1923, nor has he
ever commented in detail on his own verse or on poetry in
general. He has written many introductions to volumes of
prose, but never to a book of verse. On the basis of casual
statements his attitude seems to be the responsible, Poundian
one that good poetry is as important as good prose, but even
more rare, and that on the whole most poetry is written
without the concentration it requires, and whose absence
is more easily detectable in prose. Hemingway has enun-

PARIS 227

ciated his own taste in contemporary verse by his positive
response to the verse of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. "All
of Eliot's poems are perfect," Hemingway wrote in 1925,
"and there are very few of them. He has a very fine talent
and he is very careful of it. He never takes chances with it
and it is doing very well thank you." 9 He went on to de-
clare that Pound, on the other hand, was a major poet. "A
damned good poet," Hemingway said of Eliot, many years
later, "and a fair critic, but he would not have existed ex-
cept for dear old Ezra, the lovely poet and stupid traitor." 10
It was from Ezra Pound's edicts about imagism, in fact,
and from their application to his own verse, that Heming-
way profited most strongly from the exercise of writing
poetry. 11 He employed the same intensely concentrated
pattern that he would use in the more important prose ex-
ercises of in our time. If Hemingway lacked a capacity for
deeply sustained, original poetic expression, there was no
doubt of his gift for the forceful enunciation of emotion
and, above all, absorbing narrative. The best of the poems
in Three Stories & Ten Poems 12 particularly "Along with
Youth," "Oklahoma," and "Montparnasse" were sharp
and focused, with everything emerging from a minutely
examined object. His poems, like the vignettes and sketches
of in our time, were a final exercise in the completion of
an apprenticeship that was rooted in journalism but was
now growing beyond it.

II.

It was in our time done, after all, in the prose medium
for which its author had been training that demonstrated
most clearly Hemingway's progress as a writer. Although
the book was not published until the next year, in March,
1924, in our time was written, like the poems and the three
short stories, during the first European period of 1922 and

228 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

1923. 13 The vignettes were a blueprint of what Hemingway
was attempting stylistically and a definition of the attitudes
he was forming about his experiences. There has frequently
been an attempt to endow the vignettes either with a bio-
graphical sequence or with a sketch-by-sketch relationship
to the short stories among which they were ultimately
placed in In Our Time in 1925. The effect of these distor-
tions is to belittle Hemingway's intention and achievement
in the vignettes.

The sketches do not preserve an accurate chronology of
Hemingway's personal life. Their only chronology is the
chronology in which they were written. A vignette derived
from Kansas City is placed after vignettes drawn from the
war and from European newspaper work; bullfighting
sketches, based upon episodes observed in Spain in 1922
and 1923, precede the sketch of Nick Adams being
wounded in Italy in 1918. When Louis Cohn was preparing
the first substantial Hemingway bibliography, in 1931, he
discussed a number of such questions with his friend. u The
chapters [i.e., vignettes]," Cohn reported, "are to be con-
sidered as separate entities." 14 When Hemingway wrote
them in Europe in 1923 he was using them as tools of self-
instruction. "I was trying to write then," he said in 1932,
"and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing
truly what you felt, rather than what you were supposed
to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what
really happened in action; what the actual things were
which produced the emotion that you experienced." 15 He
also declared, on that same occasion, that he had been in-
terested in "life and death . . . commencing with the sim-
plest things." Hemingway cited specific illustrations of
what he meant by "these very simple things": "... in
the case of an execution by a firing squad," he explained,
"or a hanging. . . ."

When he discussed his apprenticeship in Death in the

PARIS 229

Afternoon in 1932, in other words, he was talking ex-
plicitly about the vignettes of in our time. The vignettes
were, quite literally, composed, and with painful, artisti-
cally instructive care. Furthermore, rearranged into basic
groups war, bullfighting, journalism they simultane-
ously demonstrate the development of Hemingway's fun-
damental themes and attitudes. The balance between the
three sets of experience was an exact one: six sketches dealt
with war, six with bullfighting, and six with newspaper
experiences. The latter are in certain ways the most signifi-
cant of the sketches. In two instances Hemingway's initial
treatment of the material is available as a Toronto Star
dispatch. The cycle of his compositional process can thus
be followed through three drafts: newspaper dispatch;
publication in the Little Review in April, 1923 16 ; and final
revision in the summer of 1923 for in our time.

III.

The first version of "chapter 3" of in our time was
cabled to Toronto from Adrianople on October 20, 1922. 17
A revision was published as the third of the Little Review
series in April, 1923. The final draft which Hemingway
gave to Bill Bird for in our time was completely declarative.

Minarets stuck up in the rain out of Adrianople across the
mud flats. The carts were jammed for thirty miles along
the Karagatch road. Water buffalo and cattle were hauling
carts through the mud. No end and no beginning. Just
carts loaded with everything they owned. The old men and
women, soaked through, walked along keeping the cattle
moving. The Maritza was running yellow almost up to
the bridge. Carts were jammed solid on the bridge with
camels bobbing along through them. Greek cavalry herded
along the procession. Women and kids were in the carts

230 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

crouched with mattresses, mirrors, sewing machines, bun-
dles. There was a woman having a kid with a young girl
holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking
at it. It rained all through the evacuation.

The 1922 cable, although it had many points of likeness
with the finished vignette, differed from it in several im-
portant respects. Its last two paragraphs were general ones,
describing the relief agencies that were operating in
Thrace. These paragraphs had no validity for the re-
drafting of the dispatch into the vignette; none of the
material appears in the second, Little Review draft, or in
the final, in our time version. The cable's first three para-
graphs, however, do constitute that first draft.

In a never-ending, staggering march the Christian popu-
lation of Eastern Thrace is jamming the roads towards
Macedonia. The main column crossing the Maritza River
at Adrianople is twenty miles long. Twenty miles of carts
drawn by cows, bullocks and muddy-flanked water buffalo,
with exhausted, staggering men, women and children,
blankets over their heads, walking blindly in the rain be-
side their worldly goods.

This main stream is being swelled from all the back
country. They don't know where they are going. They
left their farms, villages and ripe, brown fields and joined
the main stream of refugees when they heard the Turk was
coming. Now they can only keep their places in the ghastly
procession while mud-splashed Greek cavalry herd them
along like cow-punchers driving steers.

It is a silent procession. Nobody even grunts. It is all
they can do to keep moving. Their brilliant peasant cos-
tumes are soaked and draggled. Chickens dangle by their
feet from the carts. Calves nuzzle at the draught cattle
wherever a jam halts the stream. An old man marches bent

PARIS 231

under a young pig, a scythe and a gun, with a chicken tied
to his scythe. A husband spreads a blanket over a woman in
labor in one of the carts to keep off the driving rain. She
is the only person making a sound. Her little daughter
looks at her in horror and begins to cry. And the proces-
sion keeps moving.

The three paragraphs for the Daily Star were more than
competent journalism. They were well- written by any
standards. This was the cable which so impressed Lincoln
Steffens, when Hemingway showed it to him at Lausanne
in December, 1922. When Steffens wrote about the inci-
dent almost ten years later, in his autobiography, he even
used some of Hemingway's own words. Steffens remem-
bered the story as "a short but vivid, detailed picture of
what [Hemingway] had seen in that miserable stream of
hungry, frightened, uprooted people." 18 Steffens inevitably
recalled the story in terms of adjectives; Hemingway had
used a variety of modifiers in the cable. The process of re-
drafting began here.

Save for such virtually corporate words as "thirty,"
"mud," and "Greek," the in our time vignette contained
only ten legitimate adjectives: no, used twice, loaded, old,
yellow, soaked, solid, young, scared, and sick. Three were
participles, and the twice-employed "no" was not a con-
ventional descriptive adjective. Hemingway relied in the
final draft on four basic modifiers, old, yellow, young, and
sick. This was in sharp contrast to the cabled first draft,
where, sharp and clear as he made it, he nevertheless used
almost thirty adjectives. He relied there on compound
modifiers such as "never-ending," "muddy-flanked," and
"mud-splashed." He used such adjectival sequences as "ex-
hausted, staggering," and "ripe, brown." He used such
familiar modifiers as "worldly goods," and pejorative ad-
jectives like "ghastly." This was one of the devices Hem-

232 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

ingway had in mind when he spoke later of the limitations
of journalism. "In writing for a newspaper," he declared in
1932, "you told what happened and, with one trick and
another, you communicated the emotion aided by the ele-
ment of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any
account of something that has happened on that day." 19

There were other tricks which the necessities of dead-
lines and hasty readers compelled a reporter to rely on.
Hemingway's best journalism, of which the Adrianople
cable was an example, used the tricks sparingly, but they
could not be concealed. "If a writer of prose knows enough
about what he is writing about," Hemingway said in 1932,
"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.
The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-
eighth of it being above water." 20 In newspaper writing,
however, most of the effects had to be well above the sur-
face; none of them could be totally submerged.

The 1922 cable, for example, was directed for the reader
by a series of comments from the author. "They don't
know where they are going," Hemingway had written of
the refugees. He was deliberately shaping the reader's re-
sponse as a supplement to the overt impact of the scene he
was describing. He continued the prodding when he told
his Toronto audience that "now they can only keep their
places." "It is all they can do to keep moving," he added
later. Even the most obtuse reader would sense the
tragedy, but the dimension which Hemingway later termed
the architectural element of writing was necessarily lost by
this reportorial steering. There was additional, less direct
commentary to guide the newspaper reader. When Hem-
ingway wrote of the "brilliant peasant costumes," now be-
come "soaked and draggled," he was also pushing his
audience toward a reaction. Phrases such as "to keep off

PARIS 233

the driving rain" and "in horror" were equally pejorative,
designed to get through quickly to readers who ran while
they read.

All of this relatively heavy shaping was cleansed from
the vignettes. The ultimate effect became proportionately
more forceful by virtue of the new understatement and
compression. In the in our time draft the reader's horror
was far greater because he seemed to be reaching his own
conclusions. The sketch was also made more evocative, at a
subtler level, by the new image Hemingway introduced.
The metaphor of the cable was both strong and familiar.
Hemingway had enforced it by the most direct exposition.
"Now they can only keep their places in the ghastly pro-
cession," he cabled, "while mud-splashed Greek cavalry
herd them along like cow-punchers driving steers." The
grim likeness between the procession and a cattle drive is
retained in the vignette, but it has ceased to be the central
image. In a direct way it survives only in the verb of the
ninth sentence. In the second draft, in fact, for the Little
Review, Hemingway eliminated "herded" altogether. His
substitution of "rode hard on" did not satisfy him. It was
too explicit.

That momentary choice, however, did contain an ele-
ment of the new image driftwood, or, even more precise,
the log floats Hemingway had seen all through his boyhood
in northern Michigan. He re-emphasized the verb "jammed,"
used only once in the cable. The reference to the camels is
an entirely new one, particularly important because it per-
mitted the introduction of the gerund "bobbing." Gerunds,
indeed, had a new importance in the vignette. The form,
with all its utility for the communication of movement and
flow, occurs ten times in the sketch. Approximately one out
of every thirteen words was now a gerund. Not content
with this emphasis, nor with the exhaustive revision as a
whole, Hemingway inserted an additional, eleventh gerund

234 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

when the vignette was republished in 1925 in In Our Time;
in the sixth sentence he changed "walked" to "walking." 21

The effect of the driftwood image was to vivify the
paragraph. The equation with a log jam is fresher and more
denotative than the cattle metaphor. The procession is still
moving forward, as in the cable, but its progress is even
more sluggish; it is resisted, as a log jam is resisted, by its
own pressure. The frame within which the scene is held has
been altered to fit the new image. An artist in the best of his
journalism, Hemingway had bound the cable by the pro-
cession metaphor. "In a never-ending, staggering march,"
he had cabled in the first line, "the Christian population of
Eastern Thrace is jamming the roads towards Macedonia."
The last sentence of the first draft had knotted the image.
"And the procession," he concluded in 1922, "keeps mov-
ing."

For the second, Little Review draft, the frame was com-
pletely remade. The first line of the vignette not only states
the image and introduces the frame, as had been done in
the cable, but also initiates the affirmation of the image.
"Minarets," the sketch begins, "stuck up in the rain out of
Adrianople across the mud flats." As the reader moves into
the paragraph, the minarets become the long poles which
are scattered upright along the path of a log run. Through-
out the body of the sketch there is a constant emphasis and
restatement of the saturated, almost submerged quality of
the scene. The water-logged immobility is in every line. "It
rained," the vignette ends, "all through the evaluation."

This was not the last step in the process of revision. The
compositional structure of the cable had been primarily one
of paragraphs and cumulative effect. The second and third
drafts became exercises in directional composition, more
subtle than the adjectival steering of the cable. It was a
prelude of the pictorial device that would be tested in an
occasional Ruhr dispatch in April and May of 1923. "Chap-

PARIS 235

ter 3" of in our time is dominated by two figures who had
been merely part of the crowded scene in the Daily Star
cable. The woman in labor, and her weeping daughter, are
no longer details in the panoramic sweep of cavalry, an old
man, cows, water buffalo, carts, a husband, men, women,
children, calves, a young pig. Hemingway has drawn the
woman and her child out of the procession and made them
the central object. Were the vignette an etching, they
would be in a lower corner, the procession behind and
around them, illuminated by the story which is told in the
faces and positions of these two victims. This was the
Goya-like quality Hemingway deliberately sought to inject
into the vignettes of in our time; a large, incomprehensible
human tragedy was vivified by the episode within it. The
husband did not survive the rewriting. Now the weight of
our response falls upon the young girl, and the horror of
her situation is thereby magnified. There is not even a
father to shield her.

Such a deletion was a functional pruning of the same
kind which persuaded Hemingway to rearrange in each
draft the pitiful list of possessions the refugees clutched. In
the cable he used the phrase "worldly goods," stale and
unevocative, supplemented by the entire third paragraph's
precise catalogue. For the Little Review all this excessive
clutter was reduced to a single sentence. "Women and kids
were in the carts crouched with mattresses, mirrors, sewing
machines, bundles, sacks of things." In the final draft for
in our time, still anxious to eliminate the unspecific, Hem-
ingway erased "sacks of things." The possessions were the
more poignant by their specific meagerness. 22

The transformation of experience into final draft had
been a complicated process, extending over a period of
several months and marked by absorption so scrupulous
that as late as 1930, when Scribner's republished In Our
Time, Hemingway continued to make revisions in the

236 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

vignette. At that time he repressed the surviving cabelese
by inserting "There was" in the fourth sentence. He added
a comma in the tenth line after "carts," and, still preoccu-
pied with pictorial composition, he described the woman in
labor as having a "baby" rather than a "kid."

This concern with precision was much more than a
characteristic of youthful intensity or expatriate craftsman-
ship. It has continued all through Hemingway's mature
work, a persistent reflex dictated by his own artistic de-
mands. A Hemingway manuscript is a facsimile of the
three drafts of "chapter 3" of in our time, adjectives
crossed out, more precise modifiers inserted above the
erasures, punctuation meticulously altered to give weight
to key words, good verbs replaced by better ones. The
vignettes of in our time, made possible by both the demands
and the inadequacies of newspaper work, are the solid base
of Hemingway's work.

IV.

None of the other five newspaper vignettes is as com-
positionally instructive as the sketch of the refugee pro-
cession. Each of them, however, reaffirms the debt to jour-
nalism and to Paris tutorials. The scenes Hemingway chose
were characteristic of the world into which he had
thrust himself as a police reporter and war correspondent,
violent and brutish, but invariably made complex and sig-
nificant by some private gesture or act within the scene.

"Chapter 6" was the last of the six Little Review vig-
nettes. It was also the only one which survived intact the
transcription from magazine to book. Hemingway made no
revisions in it either in the summer of 1923 or later when he
was preparing it for In Our Time in 1924. It was a flawless
rendition into a creative paragraph of the cabelese he had
so admired in journalism and of the blunt declaration he
had been absorbing from Sherwood Anderson and Ger-

PARIS 237

trude Stein. Its limitation derived from this same rigidity of
syntax. The paragraph is without variation of rhetoric or
level; verb followed subject in each of the eleven sentences
with the dull perfection of a military ritual.

They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the
morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools
of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on
the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters
of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was
sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and
out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall
but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood
very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the
soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When
they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water
with his head on his knees.

Like the refugee vignette, "chapter 6" derived from
Hemingway's 1922 assignment in the Near East. It had not
been observed, however, nor had it been sifted through the
draft of a dispatch to the Daily Star. Hemingway had been
back in Europe for a month by the time the six Greek
ministers were shot in Athens on November 28, 1922. In
Paris, however, Hemingway again encountered an Ameri-
can movie cameraman whom he first met at Madame
Marie's in Adrianople in October. Shorty Wornall brought
him up to date on what took place after Hemingway's de-
parture from the area. Hemingway was attempting in
"chapter 6" to reproduce not only the execution scene
which Shorty described to him, but also the film operator's
idiom. There is a distinct parallel between the diction of the
vignette and the lines Shorty had spoken in one of Hem-
ingway's Daily Star dispatches.

238 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

"Got some swell shots of a burning village to-day."
Shorty pulled off a boot. "Good show a burning village.
Like kickin' over an ant hill. Shorty pulled off the other
boot. "Shoot it from two or three directions and it looks
like a regular town on fire. Gee I'm tired. This refugee
business is hell all right. Man sure sees some awful things
in this country." In two minutes he was snoring. 23

Such a dialogue utilization of the vignette was com-
pletely consistent. Hemingway employed several of the in
our time sketches for that kind of exercise in capturing a
particular voice. The two Mons vignettes, "chapter 4" and
"chapter 5," were drawn directly from post-war conversa-
tions with his friend Dorman-Smith, the professional Eng-
lish soldier whom he had first met in Milan in November,
1918. The clipped, upper-class diction of Sandhurst was
unmistakable and deliberate. A similar emphasis on a spe-
cific idiom occurred in "chapter 2." Hemingway clearly
intended the idiom of its narrator to be a vulgar, relatively
unliterate one. The vocabulary is as limited as that of an
English regular army officer, but in an entirely different
way. It is the colloquial one of an American city dweller.
The language has the alternating vagueness and clarity of
urban, lower-class speech. The matador "got" the horn
through his sword hand; he holds one hand "tight" against
the "place"; badly injured, the matador is said to get up
"like crazy drunk," and tries to "slug" the men. The bull-
fighter is a "kid." The narrator's language is functionally
ungrammatical; the bullfighter "couldn't hardly" lift his
arm. In the last line of the Little Review version the narrator
says that "the crowd come down the barrera into the bull
ring." One of the first fluent interpreters of bullfighting
whom Hemingway encountered in Spain, in fact, was just
such an American as the idiom of "chapter 2" characterized.
He sat next to Hemingway and Mike Strater all afternoon,

PARIS 239

and they listened to him again that night in a little Madrid
restaurant. Hemingway described him and his idiom in a
1923 article for the Star Weekly. 24 ^

Most of the vignettes, however, were primarily con-
cerned with the compositional reproduction of scene and
emotion. The voice of the narrator was generally more
anonymous than in such sketches as the Mons paragraphs
and "chapter 2" and "chapter 6." A more characteristic
treatment, in which Hemingway practiced declarative nar-
ration and ironic omission of comment, occurred in "chapter
17." The scene was an American version of the execution
of the Greek ministers. Unlike the source of "chapter 6,"
it had been closely observed by Hemingway in Kansas City
five years earlier. Sam Cardinella was hung in 1918 in the
old Jackson County jail at the corner of Missouri Avenue
and Oak Street. Hemingway's description of the jail and
its execution routine was scrupulously accurate. Like the
vignette of the Greek firing squad, this one has a bleak aura
of human triviality which is as reminiscent of Goya as the
violent scenes themselves. The anti-clerical quality is par-
ticularly noticeable; Goya's Spanish priests seldom have less
dignity than the American priest whom Hemingway de-
flates with the single verb, "skipped." When he revised the
vignette in 1924 for In Our Time, Hemingway inserted
another ironic, Goya-like detail. To the next to the last
sentence, after "chair," he added the sardonic phrase, "hold-
ing up a little crucifix."

"Chapter 18," the last vignette of in our time, provides
a different sequence of manuscript drafts. In "chapter 3"
the chronology of revision had led in a normal way from
Adrianople cable to magazine publication to book form.
Here the process was reversed. In September, 1923, several
months after he had completed the manuscript of in our
time, Hemingway was back in Toronto, hard pushed to
manufacture feature material for the Star Weekly. His first

240 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

articles, quite naturally, drew heavily upon the expatriate
experience he had so recently, and regretfully, left. One of
the earliest of these articles, published in Toronto on Sep-
tember 15, 1923, was a long account of European royalty,
partially derived, once again, from conversations in Paris
with Shorty, the American movie cameraman. 25

In these paragraphs of 1923 journalism Hemingway did
little more than reproduce with accuracy and wit the
actual conversation in Paris between himself and the Amer-
ican cameraman. A good feature writer, he was content to
exploit the easy possibilities of a situation which was tail-
ored for Sunday supplement treatment. His only deliberate
manipulation of the structure, aside from the vaudeville-like
exchanges, was to emphasize the heavy Americanisms of
Shorty and the lugubrious, basically un-British quality of
Greek royalty. Both these elements would be well received
in the provincial atmosphere of Toronto; after all, he was
back at the old stand, expressing once again "the Canadian
point of view." The vignette, on the other hand, had been
a careful, frugal treatment which shaped the situation to-
ward a specific effect.

The king was working in the garden. He seemed very
glad to see me. We walked through the garden. This is the
queen, he said. She was clipping a rose bush. Oh how do
you do, she said. We sat down at a table under a big tree
and the king ordered whiskey and soda. We have good
whiskey anyway, he said. The revolutionary committee, he
told me, would not allow him to go outside the palace
grounds. Plastiras is a very good man I believe, he said, but
frightfully difficult. I think he did right though shooting
those chaps. If Kerensky had shot a few men things might
have been altogether different. Of course the great thing in
this sort of an affair is not to be shot oneself!

It was very jolly. We talked for a long time. Like all
Greeks he wanted to go to America.

PARIS 241

Hemingway's creative concern was with George. This
was the final vignette; it would become the epilogue of
In Our Time. Its statement, in terms of the previous seven-
teen sketches, was explicit. Here, in a garden in Athens,
was the ultimate irony of a contemporary experience. The
leader of an ancient nation, whose people had recently
fought and lost a painful, costly war, out of which had
come the catastrophic Thracian refugee processions, was
discovered to be an amiable, inept facsimile of an English
gentleman. George did not equate with the inherited, ac-
cepted concepts of divine leadership and the romantic prin-
ciples of monarchial glory. George equated with any Greek
short order cook in Oak Park or Kansas City or Chicago.

The final vignette, controlled and professional, was an
appropriate climax to this thin book which Edmund Wilson
would soon call "the soundest" written by an American
about the war. 26 Small wonder that Hemingway was not
jubilant about his forthcoming return to Canada. He was
abruptly halting his literary career at the moment of igni-
tion, exchanging the stimulating world of Europe for one
about which he had no illusions; he knew Toronto too well,
in several variations. Such a detour as this, however, could
be only momentary. He had acquired too much momentum
both from his European newspaper work and from his
progress and position as a young writer. His departure from
Europe on August 17, 1923 was neither the end of one
period nor the beginning of a new one. It was no more than
a temporary suspension of the narrative.

The publication of Three Stories & Ten Poems, and the
assurance that in our time would soon appear, were the
virtual epitaph on his apprenticeship. Now there remained
only the actual separation from journalism. Toronto was
the ideal scene for such a separation.

CHAPTER
XII

TORONTO

"Hemingway seems very much not to
have liked Canada."

GERTRUDE STEIN!

Scrutinized dispassionately, with the hindsight of thirty
years, Hemingway's final Toronto period in the autumn of
1923 has all the elements of swiftly paced catastrophe. Its
chronology and actors provide the outline of a vivid melo-
drama. All the components were present: hero, villain,
dilemma and choice, suspense, theme, and explosive resolu-
tion. The four months' narrative had a neat unity of time
and place. There was even off-stage comic relief in the
person of Ezra Pound, who sent Hemingway mocking
letters from Paris, derisively addressed to "Tomato, Can."

Hemingway talked seriously, in fact, of using the experi-
ence as fiction. He discussed on several occasions the possi-
bilities of a satiric novel to be called The Son-in-Laiv. Its
principal character was to have been Harry C. Hindmarsh,
the assistant managing editor of the Daily Star. Ultimately,
however, Hemingway rejected the scenario. He explained
to a Toronto colleague, after reflection, that a novelist
should not write a book whose main character was someone
he detested; the emotion distorted your perspective, Hem-
ingway explained.

If Hemingway's transformation from journalist to writer
still required confirmation, this episode of the abandoned

TORONTO 243

novel about Harry Hindmarsh may be regarded as pro-
nouncing it complete. The principle Hemingway enunci-
ated, and by virtue of which Hindmarsh was spared a
savage fictional portrait, may have been false or question-
able; the fact that Hemingway was assessing prospective
material in such terms was the significant element. His ap-
prenticeship was over. Journalism had been the most im-
portant single factor, supplemented by travel, the shocks
of war and peace, and personal and literary associations,
but by September, 1923, its utility was ended. Hemingway's
firm and expanding psychology as a writer indicated that
an extension of journalism, particularly under the incessant
pressures of a city room schedule, could result only in chaos
and rebellion. The whole episode had a classic finality of
doom.

The decision to return to Canada for two years, to be
sure, was in many ways a sound one. Occasioned by his
wife's pregnancy and the necessity of providing their child
with a stable infancy, it was the sort of behavior which
would be taken for granted in the sober world of, say, Oak
Park. It was also, on the other hand, a notable gesture of
private fortitude in a twenty-four-year-old writer who had
been living with pleasure and professional profit in a milieu
where such decisions are almost unique. Given this kind of
mature responsibility on Hemingway's part, the plan might
conceivably have worked, despite inevitable personal stress
and possible artistic inhibition, had all the surrounding fac-
tors been ideal. The mechanism of the Toronto drama,
however, contained only the most hostile elements.

At first there was a falsely benign aura to the enterprise.
It was, after all, a kind of homecoming. Some of Heming-
way's distaste was removed by the warmth with which
Gregory Clark, the Star Weekly's feature editor, greeted
him, and by the affection which developed between the
Clarks and Mrs. Hemingway. Clark noticed that Heming-

244 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

way spoke easily and familiarly, without bravado, of Ger-
trude Stein, and Pound, and James Joyce. In his reminis-
cence there was none of the swagger that might have been
legitimately expected. Clark felt easier about the elaborate
build-up he had given down at the Star in preparation for
the prodigal's return.

The Star, as always, had had a large turnover. Heming-
way had to be introduced to most of the staff. Clark's pref-
atory enthusiasm, however, had been substantiated by
Hemingway's own achievement as a correspondent. They
had all read his European dispatches, particularly those from
the Near East. He came back to Toronto as a veteran re-
porter of some stature. He now belonged to John Bone and
the Daily Star, on the other hand, rather than to Cranston
and the more leisurely, semi-literary Star Weekly with which
he had been primarily associated in 1920 and 1921. Al-
though Cranston had reservations about the American's
temperamental capacity to adjust to the demands of a daily
paper, he was pleased with Hemingway's success. It was a
good job, one hundred and twenty-five dollars a week and,
it was assumed, a permanent assignment interviewing local
and visiting celebrities. Soon, however, like the rest of the
Star's staff, Cranston became aware that Hemingway was
receiving the celebrated Hindmarsh treatment. An impor-
tant agent in the final dissolution of Hemingway as a jour-
nalist had appeared.

Harry Comfort Hindmarsh remains today a bleak and
ambiguous individual. It is no exaggeration to say that he
is one of the half dozen most important men in North
American journalism. His papers have no particular place
in the consciousness of the American public, although most
American newspapermen are familiar with both the Daily
Star and the Star Weekly, but they dominate the highly
competitive Canadian newspaper scene. Hindmarsh, an im-
portant contributor to the emergence of this Toronto

TORONTO 245

empire, has for forty years puzzled and enraged his col-
leagues and employees. Today, as president of The Toronto
Star Limited, he is the object of vast gossip and calumny,
and occasional deep loyalty. Both he and the Star are the
targets of continuous published and private speculation. 2

In September, 1923, when Hemingway returned to
Toronto, Hindmarsh, after a decade with the Star, was its
assistant managing editor. He had succeeded Cranston
when the latter became editor of the Star Weekly. Although
he was married to the publisher's daughter hence the title
of Hemingway's abortive novel Hindmarsh himself was
harassed by his own immediate superior, John Bone. Hind-
marsh was also attempting the difficult job of simultan-
eously boosting circulation and ridding the Daily Star of
the raffish young men whose talents frequently made the
circulation possible. He has lived to see a time when he
need hire none but sober university graduates like himself.
Shortly after World War II he declared with relish: "The
cult of the prima donna [in journalism] is dead." 3

In 1923, however, the cult was very much alive, both in
Toronto and throughout the American newspaper world.
Hindmarsh concluded automatically that Hemingway, fresh
from the undisciplined routine of overseas work, was a
member of that school. Between September 10, 1923, when
he went on the Star's payroll, and September 25, Heming-
way was not assigned a single story of sufficient importance
to rate the paper's lavishly given by-line. He was sent to
the city hall with vague instructions to see what was going
on. He covered concerts at Massey Hall, and he was sum-
moned from bed at four in the morning to cover one-alarm
fires. The routine was a stereotype with a certain kind of
newspaper executive of the period; it is preserved in the
anachronistic behavior of Hollywood's city editors. Few
Star reporters of any duration escaped it. Almost all of
them have memories of front-page glory and sudden descent

246 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

to the woman's page. Hemingway, however, didn't even
have the consolation of being removed from journalistic
privilege; he began at the bottom. His degradation was ob-
served with resentment by another young reporter.

Morley Callaghan, several years younger than Heming-
way, was in 1923 a part-time member of the Star's editorial
staff. He was just completing his undergraduate work at the
University of Toronto, and beginning to write the short
stories which were to make him so significant a literary
force in the 1920's and 1930's. Like so many young men of
talent in Toronto, he had almost necessarily gravitated to-
ward the Star Weekly. One of the legends to which he
responded most actively was the picture Greg Clark and
Jimmy Cowan and Frise, the cartoonist, had created for
him that summer of their friend Hemingway. Callaghan's
first glimpse of Hemingway did not increase his own pre-
carious adjustment to the perverse world of Hindmarsh's
city room.

"One morning that fall," Callaghan recalled in 1952, "I
went over to check the assignment book." Callaghan, an
articulate man, has a precise and ready memory. "I looked
down the list and I saw Hemingway's name, and then his
name again, and finally, down at the bottom, I saw it a third
time." The young Canadian, who thought of Hemingway
as one whose literary career had been firmly launched, was
naturally curious about what kinds of assignments he was
being given, and why he should receive so many of them.
He was appalled at what he saw. "They were all piddling,"
Callaghan remembered, "just junk assignments." At this
moment Callaghan first saw Hemingway, whom he rec-
ognized from Jimmy Cowan's description. Hemingway
walked over and studied the book himself. "Jesus Christ,"
he muttered.

Callaghan and Hemingway, inevitably, became close
friends that autumn. Their friendship survived into the late

TORONTO 247

1920's, when Callaghan moved to Paris for a time; finally
it dissolved in the meaningless acrimony of New York liter-
ary gossip. Callaghan never concealed his admiration for
certain aspects of Hemingway's work, nor did he ever be-
little his own early debt to the American. "I'll always be
grateful to Hemingway," said Callaghan, thirty years after
that first meeting in the Toronto city room, "because at a
time when I needed encouragement he told me I was going
to be a great writer." 4

In the fall of 1923 Callaghan's serious writing had scarcely
incubated. Hemingway, a published writer and the friend
of legendary Paris figures, was an important experience for
him. Their relationship in Toronto verifies from another
direction the solidity of Hemingway's projection of him-
self at this time as a writer rather than a newspaper man.
Callaghan was astonished to discover later, in Paris, that he
and Hemingway were virtually contemporaries. The lat-
ter's air of maturity in Toronto came from more than his
involvement in the war, or the fact that he was married.
It stemmed directly from his professional concept of writ-
ing as an intensely worthy craft. His deep seriousness
about writing endowed Hemingway with adulthood and
sobriety. His affinity for Callaghan was a symptom of this.
There were other reporters whom Hemingway might have
cultivated with more profit to himself. Callaghan was not
only an obscure member of the staff, he was also, in his
own memory of the period, "very, very green." Heming-
way, however, was drawn instinctively to his transparent
intensity about writing.

The editorial staff as a whole was literate and intelligent;
many of them had the conventional newspaperman's ambi-
tions to write fiction. None of them had the rigidity of
purpose which Hemingway and Callaghan shared. It is
significant that when Gregory Clark tried to sort out his
memories of this period, in 1950, he persistently confused

248 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Callaghan with Hemingway, and vice versa. The average
would-be writer on the Star, as on most newspapers,
rarely looked beyond the Saturday Evening Post, and sel-
dom that high. They were more impressed, indeed, by
Hemingway's success as a foreign correspondent than by
the beginnings of his literary career; Callaghan thought of
him as a writer who was temporarily and unfortunately a
reporter. The two had in common their unsolemn dedica-
tion to art.

Hemingway urged Callaghan to commit himself totally
to serious writing. Callaghan remembered the American as
being "bishop-like" in his severity and urgency. They read
each other's work and talked about "all other living
writers/' and in particular of Sherwood Anderson, whom
Callaghan admired immensely. Callaghan was shown the
proofs of in our time when they arrived from Paris. Thus
Hemingway created the illusion of a transplanted Latin
Quarter, introducing an air of deep resolve into the limited
world of the Toronto arts. He was a figure of substance
to the young reporters of his own age. Once or twice they
feted him in their fraternity house at the university. Hem-
ingway's comment after one of these salons indicated again
the kind of milieu with which he had enveloped himself.
"They made me feel like Anatole France," he told a
colleague.

Hemingway's confidante on that occasion was Mary
Lowry, an intelligent, witty Canadian who was emancipat-
ing herself from much the same genteel background Hem-
ingway had known in Oak Park. Later she published a
number of deftly written short stories and established her-
self as a successful free lance. In 1923, however, she was
merely another rebellious Star reporter, thoroughly famil-
iar with the Hindmarsh treatment. Her small office became
a refuge for Hemingway. "He would storm in there," she
said many years later, "and rave and rant about that so and

TORONTO 249

so." 5 She found him an engaging fellow sufferer, and even
in his frustration an amiable and entertaining prisoner.
"Hemingway," she remembered, "was always lots of fun."
With several others from the paper they used to gather
after work or between assignments at Child's for coffee, or
at Angelo's, where chianti was served in the thick china
cups of a dry town.

Prohibition and its indignities were but another of the
elements which menaced Hemingway's plan to remain in
journalism for an additional two years. Toronto was a cari-
cature of puritanism, notorious for its blue laws and its
Sabbath solemnity. Hemingway's response to such personal
restrictions was characteristic of Americans who had lived
abroad. He and Mary Lowry were sent to cover a conclave
of Toronto clergymen discussing the necessity for legal
censorship of the movies. As an attitude this was for Hem-
ingway merely a variation of prohibition. He slouched
down in his chair, feet up on the bench in front of him,
grumbling and cursing. "Goddamn," he told the girl loudly,
"I hate refinement."

Had he deliberately sought an area of organized refine-
ment, Hemingway could not have selected a better locale
than Toronto. Even the countryside repelled him. His first
substantial assignment, on September 24, took him to the
mining towns west of Toronto. The landscape was not very
different from what he had seen, unappalled, in the Ruhr
that spring. He was as temporarily unreasonable as most
reluctant repatriates. "Driving through it," he wrote for
the Daily Star, "was like going through some desolate early
illustration of Pilgrim's Progress." 6 He might have used the
same metaphor to describe the sequence of six-day working
weeks he was spending in the desolate routine of Toronto
journalism. This was a vocational morass he had been pre-
viously spared. The Toronto Daily Star was as different
from the Kansas City Star as is the New York Journal

250 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

American different from the Herald Tribune or the late
Boston Transcript.

IL

In 1923, under the energetic leadership of Hindmarsh's
father-in-law, the late Joseph E. Atkinson, 7 the Star was
emerging as the colossus of Canadian journalism. Sensational
headlines, red type, comic strips, eyewitness and flamboyant
reportage, basic English, and many photographs were the
fundamental tools. In the bible-belt atmosphere of southern
Ontario the Star's management also uncovered in religion
an appeal which Hearst, for example, though he frequently
attempted it, was never able to exploit fully in the United
States. Atkinson's nickname in the trade was an indication
of the pious hypocrisy his contemporaries felt they detected
in the contradictory components of his papers. They called
him Holy Joe. 8

There was no style book on the Star, and no editor with
the scrupulous regard for prose that had distinguished Pete
Wellington. Both Hindmarsh and the managing editor, John
Bone, were hard-working editors with genuine talents for
discovering news and merchandising it profitably, but there
was no exchange department here, nor was there the cama-
raderie of a group of young reporters determined to write
fiction. The staff was intelligent, cynical, and wholly inse-
cure. The paper was racked by alternate spasms of free
spending and hangovers of harsh economy. It was a pro-
vincial paper run in a big-town way. On the whole it ex-
hibited most of the flaws and few of the virtues of both
categories. Veteran Toronto newsmen recall the existence
of only one prose directive in the Star's city room. On the
bulletin board was an admonishment to "Put a Punch in
Every Paragraph." Beyond this the Star did not venture in
matters of rhetoric.

Hemingway's vocational reaction to this atmosphere was

TORONTO 251

a natural one. He manufactured, by and large, the kind of
material that was required. His first story was published on
September 15, by the Star Weekly* \ Cranston bought it to
tide Hemingway over until he went on the Daily Star pay-
roll. The article established the pattern of much of the work
he would do during the next three and a half months. In it
he exploited the sort of gossip a working newspaperman
acquires almost unconsciously. Assessing his audience with
cynical shrewdness, Hemingway prepared a Sunday supple-
ment treatment of contemporary European royalty. It was
written with a minimum of organization and re-drafting;
Hemingway's reservoir of intimate anecdote, and the en-
gaging background of personal reminiscence, provided read-
ability and movement.

Hemingway's work continued to demonstrate this expert,
angry facility. Late in October he managed to get himself
transferred to the Star Weekly staff, removing himself to
a degree from Hindmarsh's tyranny. 10 He was unquestion-
ably one of the magazine's principal attractions. 11 He shared
the featured columns with Fred Griffin and Gregory Clark.
Occasionally, as in two excellent installments on bullfight-
ing, Hemingway laid aside his facility and attempted to
transcribe the kind of emotion and narrative he had already
achieved in the stories and vignettes of his two Paris vol-
umes. 12 In the second of these Spanish articles, indeed, he
spilled out his restless longing for a reprieve from Toronto
and from journalism. "That was just three months ago," he
wrote bitterly, after a buoyant description of the Pamplona
fiesta. "It seems in a different century now, working in an
office. . . . But it is only fourteen days by water to Spain
and there is no need for a castle. There is always that room
at 5 Calle de Eslava "

For the moment, however, he could only sublimate his
distress with the dubious release of Star Weekly freedom as
opposed to Daily Star oppression. He turned frequently to

252 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

his European memories, for stories about continental hunt-
ing, fishing, and skiing. 13 His nostalgia even permitted him
to make a new assessment of his Black Forest experience of
two summers before. A Toronto exile had cleansed the
original dispatches of their querulous prejudice; to that
extent the Canadian banishment was a purge.

... we fished all through the Black Forest. With rucksacks
and fly-rods, we hiked across country, sticking to the high
ridges and the rolling crests of the hills, sometimes through
deep pine timber, sometimes coming out into a clearing and
farmyards and again going for miles without seeing a soul
except occasional wild looking berry pickers. We never
knew where we were. But we were never lost because at
any time we could cut down from the high country into
a valley and know we could hit a stream. Sooner or later
every stream flowed into a river and a river meant a
town. . . . We cut across the high, bare country, dipping
down into valleys and walking through the woods, cool
and dim as a cathedral on the August hot day. 14

There were paragraphs as effective as these in almost all
the material he wrote in Toronto during the last months of
1923. Hemingway, after all, was now a relatively finished
writer; inevitably his journalism occasionally displayed
thoughtful or instinctive craft. These were isolated para-
graphs, however, frequently buried in a soggy, journeyman
treatment. The general tone of his articles became increas-
ingly pedestrian. By early November he was writing two
long articles for almost every issue of the Star Weekly.
"Pretty soon," he told another reporter bitterly, "Fll be
writing the whole damn magazine." It even became neces-
sary to mask part of his productivity behind the decent
cloak of a pseudonym; the most flagrant of his hack work

TORONTO 253

began to appear under the by-line of John Hadley. 15 Fre-
quently, whether they were signed with his own or Had-
ley's name, his stories were little more than extensions of
news items briefly used by the Daily Star or turned over
to the Star Weekly by the city desk for feature treatment.
Hemingway-Hadley wrote at length of the possibilities of
flood in the Great Lakes, of General Wolfe's diaries, of an
experiment for introducing iodine into the Toronto reser-
voirs, and of the impregnability of Ontario bank vaults. 18

It was sorry material on which to waste the time that
even such synthetic stories required. It was impossible for
him to turn to his own work. "I write slowly," he told
Ernest Walsh in 1925, "and with a great deal of difficulty
and my head has to be clear to do it. While I write the
stuff I have to live it in my head/' 17 There wasn't room in
his head for cops and robbers stories, a six-day week, and
serious writing. Even to his journalism he brought stand-
ards that were personally exacting. "Don't talk about it
before you write it," he warned Mary Lowry once, as they
walked back to the Star after a provocative interview with
the survivors of a Japanese earthquake. "You mustn't talk
about it," Hemingway insisted. "You'll spoil it." 18

Sometimes, of course, Hemingway found material to
which he responded. On November 24 he printed in the
Star Weekly, without a by-line, a highly personal statement
on contemporary literature. 19 The article, whose sharp
brevity was more characteristic of his fiction than of his
usually wordy stories for Cranston, was occasioned by the
award of the Nobel Prize to William Butler Yeats. The
point of view was forceful and informed, written in the
sardonic idiom with which he has customarily delivered his
literary opinions; it would have been more suitably placed
in the columns of Poetry or the Little Review. "William
Butler Yeats has written, with the exception of a few poems

254 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

by Ezra Pound, the very finest poetry of our rime. This
is a statement that will be instantly challenged by the ad-
mirers of Alfred Noyes, John Masefield, Bliss Carman, and
Robert Service. Let them read what they like. There is
little use in attempting to convert a lover of coca-cola to
vintage champagne." 20

By mid-November Hemingway had decided to go back
to Europe with the new year. Stimulated by his decision,
and acting upon Cranston's friendly agreement to help
finance the trip through the purchase of extra Star Weekly
stories, Hemingway poured out a torrent of copy so large
that the magazine was still using his material after he had
left Toronto. He wrote a hasty but provocative description
of a confidence man selling worthless European currency to
hungry vagrants, 21 and he assembled an exhaustive chronicle
of anecdote about European night life. 22 A long story pub-
lished on December 22 was slickly tailored for the Christ-
mas season. 23 Its three separate episodes, each of them
illustrating the holiday as celebrated in Switzerland, Italy,
and Paris, indicated once again that he was instinctively
working in fiction patterns. The material of these vignettes
was generally mawkish and careless, but the sketches them-
selves were presented in terms of situation and dialogue,
with a well-paced narrative and a certain amount of climax
and resolution. On the whole, however, Hemingway dis-
played himself to better immediate advantage in less per-
sonal material, in articles about Toronto bookies, legendary
New Year's Eves, the world's great imposters, and mem-
ories of Chicago. 24 The final fruit of the Toronto misadven-
ture was published on January 19, 1924, a derisive sneer in
which Hemingway could no longer suppress his contempt
for the New World and his jubilation about his European
prospects. In a trolley two girls had giggled about his felt
hat.

TORONTO 255

"Say," said a gentleman in a cap, who had been observing
me truculently for some blocks, "what do you mean getting
fresh with a couple of girls?"

"I'm very sorry, sir, but I cannot detain you longer." I
bowed. "But I must leave the street car here. I have an ap-
pointment with the new mayor."

"For two bits I'd give you a sock on the jaw," observed
the gentleman in the cap.

"I couldn't think of it for a moment," I said. "My dear
fellow, it would be quite impossible. I could not think of
accepting a piece of hosiery from a chance acquaintance,
no matter how pleasant."

I bowed again and descended from the car. The gentle-
man in the cap was comforting the two young ladies.

"I'd have poked him a minute," said the gentleman.

"He had no right to talk to a decent working girl like
that," sobbed one of the girls.

"I'd have poked him," comforted the gentleman in the
cap. 25

The friction between Hemingway and the assistant man-
aging editor had not been dissolved by the former's trans-
ference to the staff of the Star Weekly. Cranston's men
were always at the disposal of Hindmarsh, either for regular
city desk assignments or for special chores. Hemingway's
attitude toward the Daily Star editor had been openly hos-
tile since early October. At that time Hindmarsh sent him
to New York to cover the arrival of Lloyd George, despite
the young American's plea that his wife would almost cer-
tainly be delivered in Toronto during those few days. 26

One of Hemingway's colleagues remembered that the
latter's single comment, on another occasion, when Hind-
marsh ordered him to a municipal park to get a nature story,

256 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

had been: "Let's go back to the office and beat the hell out
of Hindmarsh." The circumstances of Hemingway's ulti-
mate resignation from the Star are obscure, clouded by
conflicting testimony and the reticence that has often
muzzled witnesses to many such episodes on the paper.
Hemingway, however, was never reticent about the Star.
His own version of the final break, written years later in
a letter to Cranston at a time when the retired editor was
preparing a volume of reminiscences was precise and psy-
chologically plausible.

Hemingway told Cranston in 1951 that he had been
assigned to do an interview with Count Aponyi, the Hun-
garian diplomat. The Hungarian gave Hemingway a num-
ber of official documents which would clarify his mission,
and "extracted a promise that they would be returned later
in the day." Hemingway sent the papers to Hindmarsh,
with a note requesting him to put the papers in the office
safe until he could take them back to the Count. Hindmarsh,
according to Hemingway, read the note and threw the
documents in the wastebasket. Later that day, in the normal
routine of office-cleaning procedure, they were burned in
the furnace. Hemingway resigned as soon as he learned of
the destruction of the papers.

Even the bookkeeping records of the Star do not clarify
the episode. They merely indicate that Hemingway resigned
some time in December and drew his final pay on the last
day of the month. It was an explosive separation; around
it there developed extravagant details that have made it one
of the legendary city room tales. Many years later Heming-
way's venom toward Hindmarsh was sufficiently alive so
that he responded aggressively to a Toronto Newspaper
Guild plea for contributions with which to organize the
Star. He sent the Guild a check for one hundred dollars,
"to beat Hindmarsh." 27 After four pages of eloquent com-
ment on his former editor, he changed his mind. "On sec-

TORONTO 257

ond thought," Hemingway wrote, "I'm making it $200. I
welcome the opportunity to take a swing at that . . . Hind-
marsh."

In January, 1924, Hemingway and his small family left
Toronto, their proposed two years in Canada reduced to
four months. Hemingway never went back, although one
of the ingredients of his Toronto legend is that he appeared
triumphantly in person in the Star city room to distribute
copies of his first novel. He did continue to write Greg
Clark and Morley Callaghan. Once in a mood of depression
years later he speculated to Clark about a fishing trip to
northern Ontario, where he felt one could escape entirely
from society. He remembered Cranston with affection, and
when the latter took his family abroad in 1925 it was Hem-
ingway who guided them around Paris. "I never enjoyed
myself so much," he told Cranston early in 1951, "as work-
ing under you and with Greg Clark and Jimmy Frise. It
was why I was sad to quit newspaper work. Working under
Hindmarsh was like being in the German army with a poor
commander." He saw a good deal of Morley Callaghan
during the next few years in Paris, but on the whole
Toronto held for him the bitter memories which equate
with any suspension of forward movement.

That the period was no more than a suspension had been
made clear by the occasional real quality of his journalism
that fall, as well as by the genuine professional aura which
such interested young writers as Callaghan, Mary Lowry,
and Jimmy Cowan detected in him. Within these final ex-
ercises of his literary apprenticeship are the tangible evi-
dences of his five years of training. He had perfected the
narrative talent which would be a characteristic of all his
fiction, and which has enabled him to reach more varieties
of readers than any other serious writer of his generation.
His instinct for narrative had always been a strong one.
Journalism altered the instinct from gift to craft. The kind

258 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

of newspaper writing he did between 1920 and 1923, and
the basic lessons he received in Kansas City in 1917 and
1918, required that he tell stories rather than report events.
The rather special pattern of Hemingway's employers
had also permitted and encouraged the development of such
an important instrument of his fiction as dialogue. The con-
ventional inhibitions of spot news reporting, with its in-
sistence on the merely factual and expository, were replaced
for Hemingway by a medium which facilitated his training
as a fictionalist through its appetite for human interest
material. Even in the hasty structures of his 1923 journalism
Hemingway erupted into passages of vivid, careful speech
which confirmed his obligation to the Star Weekly's flexi-
bility.

He was an old man, with a face like a leather water bottle.

"Well, Papa, no fish today," I said.

"Not for you," he said solemnly.

"Why not for me? For you, maybe?" I said.

"Oh, yes," he said, not smiling. "For me trout always.
Not for you. You don't know how to fish with worms."
And spat into the stream.

"You're so rich you know everything. You are probably
a rich man from your knowledge of fishworms," I said. 28

The necessity to communicate people rather than events,
and the stylistic freedom both the Star Weekly and the
Daily Star extended to their reporters, enabled Hemingway
to exercise the lucid exposition which would in three years
vivify The Sun Also Rises. His coverage of the Lloyd
George assignment in October, 1923, was an uneven one,
made more exasperating than usual by the amount of copy
that was required of him and by his separation from his
wife during the last weeks of her pregnancy. The highly
personal diction of his serious writing, nevertheless, could

TORONTO 259

be practiced without reprimand for such a paper. Heming-
way attempted a definition of the English politician's ora-
tory. "It is his wonderful voice," he wrote, "combined with
his Gaelic gift of prophecy that strikes one. When he talks,
you feel he is a prophet, and prophets have a way of their
own. He talks much as Peter the Hermit must have talked
about the crusades." 29 The sharply etched lines of portrai-
ture were equal testimony to Hemingway's debt to the
freedoms of Star journalism. "With his silvery hair and
keen face," Hemingway explained in another Lloyd George
dispatch, "he looked in the big cape like some retired
medieval fencing master." 30

Journalism had also encouraged, in this same area, Hem-
ingway's persistent and usually legitimate air of vast knowl-
edgeability. It was part of a newspaperman's necessity for
and opportunities of being on the inside of a situation. Au-
thenticity is above all a reporter's virtue. Journalism en-
couraged Hemingway to throw himself responsively into
whatever atmosphere he was exploring. It required him to
know just a shade more than the layman about any given
situation. An inevitable extension of this vocational knowl-
edgeability, of course, was a sardonic recognition of human
frailty and a skepticism about large truths. Hemingway's
sense of humor had always been a highly developed one.
The hearty nature of his adolescent burlesque was en-
couraged by the Star Weekly; as the scope of his journalism
extended into politics and diplomacy, his wit became more
subtle and ironic.

"Although Lloyd George is universally popular with
Americans," Hemingway wrote characteristically on Oc-
tober 8, 1923, just before he finished that particular assign-
ment, "some of them seem just a bit confused as to who
he is. One New Yorker said to The Star: 1 guess there
wasn't anybody else could take the helm the way he did.
I have just finished reading his book, Men Like

260 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

guess things would be pretty good all right if we had that
Utopia, eh? 7 " 31 In December, 1923, writing about Euro-
pean night life, Hemingway remembered a conversation at
Florence's in Paris, where the proprietress and staff were
American Negroes.

"Miss Flawnce she ain't a niggah no mo. No suh. She
done tell customahs mammy's an Indian lady fum Canada,"
a waiter explained. "Ah'm luhnin' to talk that English way,
too. Ah'm goin' tuh tell people my mammy's an Indian lady
f uhm Noble Scotia. Yes, suh. We'll all be Indiums this tahm
nex' yeah. Yes, suh." 32

Of all the tangible professional profits that came to Hem-
ingway through his apprenticeship in newspaper work, this
knowledgeability and its sardonic derivation of wit were
the most immediately apparent. His style matured to a
degree in the discipline of cabelese; after his association
with Gertrude Stein he began to introduce the harsh, de-
clarative structure of his mature prose into his feature
material. On the whole, however, his newspaper rhetoric
could seldom be more economical than was appropriate to
a reporter who was usually paid by the word. The inter-
ludes of buoyant humor and ironic wit were basic to his
success as a correspondent; he exercised them constantly.
In the months immediately after his abandonment of news-
paper work, in fact, Hemingway was inclined to think of
himself at least in part as a humorist.

This attitude was stimulated by his friendship with
Donald Ogden Stewart, whom he had first met in Europe
in 1923, and of whom he saw a great deal in 1924 and
1925. He was much impressed by the satirist's work and
its success and particularly by Mr. and Mrs. Haddocks
Abroad. One of the last pieces of journalism Hemingway
attempted at this time, indeed, was a humorous account of

TORONTO 2(51

bullfighting which Stewart rejected in 1924 for Vanity Fair.
Hemingway thought of "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" as a funny
story, and as late as July, 1925, when he was working on
the first draft of The Sun Also Rises, he regarded that
manuscript as in part a humorous one. In the fall of 1925,
as an interlude between drafts of the novel, Hemingway
wrote the satiric The Torrents of Spring. Here, in the
parody and irony of literary denunciation, Hemingway dis-
played among other qualities the fluency and ease of news-
paper training. The book was written, its author claimed,
in ten days. To the degree that it was hasty and, according
to some versions, written solely to make money, it derived
directly from his journalism. It was also, however, a very
funny book, which it was meant to be, and occasionally a
very thoughtful book, professionally, which it was also
meant to be; in the sense that it was a blend of haste and
talent, The Torrents of Spring was his journalistic epitaph.
Between late 1925, however, when he wrote the satire,
and January, 1924, when he formally abandoned journal-
ism, Hemingway wrote a number of excellent short stories
and the first draft of his novel. Journalism was completely
thrust aside in its inhibitory sense on January 19, 1924,
when the Hemingways sailed from New York on the
Cunard liner Antonia. "Toronto," Hemingway told his
friends from the Star in ironic farewell, "has taken five
years off my life." His sense of humor and general maturity
allowed him to recover rapidly from the disaster of those
final four months of newspaper work; 1924 would be a
year of intensive serious writing. His bitterness about the
Toronto episode, however, never completely healed. Even
the manner in which Cranston was discarded by the Star
in 1932 enraged him. "He was as badly treated by the
Toronto Star" Hemingway declared in 1952, not long be-
fore the editor's death, "as a man could be and that is almost
as far as a man can get in being badly treated."

262 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Journalism had been laborious and frequently exasperat-
ing. It had also been financial security of a sort, and the
virtually certain guarantee of an increasingly profitable
future. It required considerable artistic intensity to abandon
a vocation in which he was a professional, with good cre-
dentials, and to turn instead to the insecurity of creative
writing. He was in 1924 merely one of a number of promis-
ing young American writers. The compulsion could not be
resisted. "Ernest," his wife said many years later, "felt if
we did not get away from that atmosphere quickly, his
soul, which means his own creative writing, would dry up
within him."

Hemingway's debt to journalism was a large one, and he
always acknowledged it. Unlike many ex-newspapermen,
however, he neither sentimentalized the profession nor mis-
understood its essential threat to creative writing. "In news-
paper work," he explained later, "you have to learn to
forget every day what happened the day before." He al-
ways felt a parallel between journalism and war. Each, he
maintained, is valuable to a writer "up until the point that
it forcibly begins to destroy your memory." His views on
this are emphatic. "A writer must leave it before that point.
But he will always have scars from it."

The last days in Toronto evaporated in farewell parties,
the determined drudgery by which he flooded Cranston
with Star Weekly articles, and a wedding in their apart-
ment at which Hemingway was best man for Jimmy
Cowan. Mary Lowry saw them off at the station, and an
awkward, partly unhappy, occasionally profitable episode
was over. He had embedded himself in the legend of the
Toronto newspaper world. Younger men who joined the
Star were entertained and instructed by the tales of his fury
and his skill and his ironic wit. The paper became distantly
vain of his association with it; the morgue accumulated a
substantial Hemingway folder. In occasional items which

TORONTO 263

the Star printed about his books, its reporters sometimes
referred to him as "a former Torontonian." It must have
made him laugh. He was no more a former Torontonian,
Chicagoan, or Kansas Citian, than he was a former news-
paperman. He had lived in all those places, and in many
others, and he had been a newspaperman, but he had be-
come a writer.

NOTES

Complete documentation of this study, so much of whose
material was assembled through correspondence and interview,
would have required, quite literally, almost one hundred footnotes
for each twenty-five pages of text. In order to avoid such a repeti-
tive apparatus, and yet at the same time maintain some decencies
of responsible documentation, footnotes have been attached, in the
main, only to those statements whose entire text is readily available
to the general reader. This has not been a fixed principle; whenever
a chapter's footnoting seemed to allow a moderate amount of ex-
tension, without becoming an unwieldy catalogue, I have included
full citation of this research by correspondence and interview. Un-
less a specific declaration is made in the footnote, all the corres-
pondence is unpublished. Hemingway's short stories are in all cases
cited from their first magazine or book appearance, since the date
and nature of original publication are generally relevant to the
theme of apprenticeship.

266 NOTES

The following abbreviations are used throughout the notes:
Baker

Brumback

CAF

Cohn

D1TA

DS
EH

(Int.)

"Malady of Power"

Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The
Writer as Artist (Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1952).

Theodore Brumback, "With Hem-
ingway before A Farewell to Arms"
Kansas City Star (December 6,
1936), 1C, 2C.

Charles A. Fenton.

Louis H. Cohn, A Bibliography of
the Works of Ernest Hemingway
(Random House, 1931).

Ernest Hemingway, Death in the
Afternoon (Scribner's, 1932).

Toronto Daily Star.
Ernest Hemingway.

Indicates that the material was ob-
tained by interview with the par-
ticular source on the specified date:
i.e., J. C. Edgar to CAF, March 15,
1952 (Int.).

Ernest Hemingway, "The Malady
of Power," Esquire, IV (Novem-
ber, 1935), 31, 198-199.

"Monologue to the Maestro" Ernest Hemingway, "Monologue to

the Maestro," Esquire, III (Octo-
ber, 1935), 21, 174A, 174B.

"Old Newsman"

SW
Toklas

Ernest Hemingway, "Old News-
man Writes," Esquire, II (Decem-
ber, 1934), 25-26.

Toronto Star Weekly.

Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas, (Harcourt, Brace,
1933).

NOTES 267

CHAPTER ONE

Hemingway's high school fiction and journalism have never been
reprinted or collected. His position, legitimate and understandable
in a writer of his exacting personal standards, is that juvenilia be-
longs to the author and his wastebasket. There is a file of the
Trapeze in the school library. Most private Hemingway collections,
and many major American libraries, possess those issues of the
Tabula containing Hemingway's fiction and poetry. I am deeply
indebted to the following individuals for the patience and gener-
osity with which they endured and clarified my questions: Miss
Fannie Biggs; the late Arthur Bobbitt; Colonel Wayne Brandstadt;
Mrs. Kenneth W. Carr; Mrs. Margaret Adams Charnals; Lewis A.
Clarahan; Chester B. Clifford; Mrs. Robert Craig Corlett; Richard A.
Craig; Miss Jean Crawford; Albert W. Dungan; Mrs. Elsbeth Eric;
John Gehlmann; Mrs. Charles E. Goodell; Mrs. Olga F. Gray; Mrs.
F. L. Gjesdahl; Paul F. Haase; Tom H. Hildebrand; Mrs. Carl
Howe, Jr.; Mrs. Carl R. Kesler; Miss Elizabeth G. Kimball; Mrs.
George C. Kindred; Mrs. J. J. Lowitz; Roswell H. Maveety; Mrs.
Avery A. Morton; Frank J. Platt; Hale Printup; Gordon D. Shorney;
Elliott Smeeth; Mrs. Richard Wilson Steele; Arthur L. Thexton;
Professor Edward Wagenknecht; Miss Ruth Wagenknecht; Philip
M. White; Mrs. Mildred B. Wilcox; The Reverend Edward W.
Willcox; Mrs. Janet Lewis Winters; Lyman Worthington; Miss
Margaret Wright; Miss Mignon Wright; Deb Wylder; and Dr.
Eugene Youngert.

1. Janet Lewis Winters to CAF, May 8, 1952. Mrs. Winters, wife
of the critic and poet, Yvor Winters, and herself a well-known
poet and university teacher, graduated from Oak Park High
School in 1916.

2. There is a harsher picture of both Oak Park and its high school,
as experienced by one of the few lower middle-class members
of the overwhelmingly middle-class student body, in the auto-
biography of Robert St. John, This Was My World (Double-
day, 1953). St. John's comments are a realistic antidote to the
consistently mellow recollections of the majority group to
which Hemingway belonged, but as a distinct minority report
they do not alter the general picture of secure and prosperous
suburbia.

3. Samuel Putnam, Paris Was Our Mistress (Viking, 1947), 128-
29. Solemn literary pronouncements of this kind are generally
ironic on Hemingway's part. The statement itself, however, is
well authenticated; Putnam made immediate notes on the con-

268 NOTES

versation, which took place in Paris shortly after the publica-
tion of The Sun Also Rises in 1926.

4. Senior Tabula (Publishing Board of the Oak Park and River
Forest Township High School, 1917), 105. The final issue of
the Tabula was annually entitled Senior Tabula, fulfilling the
function of a Class Book for the graduating class. Hereafter
cited as Senior Tabula.

5. "Monologue to the Maestro," 174B.

6. Senior Tabula, 23.

7. Ernest Hemingway, "Judgment of Manitou," Tabula, XXII
(February, 1916), 9-10. Both the Tabula and the Trapeze were
indifferently proofread. Mistakes in punctuation and spelling
have been silently corrected.

8. Ernest Hemingway, "A Matter of Colour," Tabula, XXIII
(April, 1916), 16-17.

9. Ernest Hemingway, "Sepi Jingan," Tabula, XXIII (Novem-
ber, 1916), 8-9.

10. Ernest Hemingway, "How Ballad Writing Affects Our Sen-
iors," Tabula, XXIII (November, 1916), 41.

11. Ernest Hemingway, "The Inexpressible," Tabula, XXIII
(March, 1917), 46; ibid., "The Worker," 22.

12. Ernest Hemingway and Fred Wilcoxen, "Athletic Verse,"
Tabula, XXIII (March, 1917), 39.

13. EH to CAF, September 23, 1951. Hemingway had forgotten
a vivid description of football's tedious horrors in The Tor-
rents of Spring (Scribner's, 1926), 85-6.

14. Trapeze, VI (March 2, 1917), [1].

15. "Ring Lardner Returns," Trapeze, VI (May 4, 1917), [3].

16. "Some Space Filled by Ernest Macnamara Hemingway," Tra-
peze, XXV (May 11, 1917), [3]. The volume numbering of the
paper shifts unaccountably in several issues of this period. The
bound volume, however, is labeled without variation as
Volume VI.

17. "High Lights and Low Lights," Trapeze, XXV (May 25,
1917), [4].

18. Trapeze, XXV (May 25, 1917), [2].

19. Ibid., [1]. This was an unsigned article listing the college
plans of the class of 1917.

20. Ernest Hemingway, "Class Prophecy," Senior Tabula, 57-62.

21. Ernest Hemingway, "Defense of Dirty Words," Esquire, II
(September, 1934), 158D.

22. Idem.

NOTES 269

CHAPTER TWO

This chapter, like its predecessor, could not have been written
without the patient assistance of a number of generous people. The
reliance upon their testimony is necessarily heavy, since no ma-
terial comparable to Hemingway's high school writing is available
to the student of his Kansas City period. Save for the single ex-
ception noted in the text, it is impossible to identify with real
assurance the stories written by Hemingway for the Star in 1917
and 1918. 1 am irreparably indebted to the following individuals for
their many kindnesses: Charles I. Blood; Sumner Blossom; George
T. Bye; Marvin H. Creager; Russel Grouse; Clyde Brion Davis;
J. N. Darling; J. Charles Edgar; Paul W. Fisher; E. B. Garnett;
Norman Greer; the late Henry J. Haskell; Wilson Hicks; Clifford
Knight; Landon Laird; Frances and Richard Lockridge; the late
Lionel C. Moise; William B. Moorhead; William M. Reddig;
Robert H. Reed; T. Murray Reed; John Selby; Wesley W. Stout;
E. H. Taylor; Harry Van Brunt; Marcel Wallenstein; C. G.
Wellington; Paul I. Wellman; Dale Wilson; and Montgomery
Wright.

1. Maxwell Perkins, "Ernest Hemingway," Book-of-the-Month
Club News (October, 1940), 4. This brief sketch by Heming-
way's editor and friend was written on the occasion of the
publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls.

2. Tyler Hemingway died in Kansas City in 1922. Henry J.
Haskell died on August 20, 1952, after fifty-four years on the
staff of the Star. He had been its editor since 1928. He was
twice awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

3. Courtney Ryley Cooper, "Star Man," Saturday Evening Post,
CCIX (December 19, 1936), 56.

4. Henry J. Haskell to CAF, February 8, 1952.

5. Kansas City Times, November 26, 1940, 1. Hemingway gave
this interview, published in the morning edition of the Star,
in Kansas City. The interview, an excellent one, and itself a
good illustration of Pete Wellington's tutelage, had neither
by-line nor initials. Its author was Paul W. Fisher, at the time
a reporter on the Star, and later director of public relations
for United Aircraft.

6. Idem.

7. Mr. Moise died on August 7, 1952, at Desert Hot Springs,
California. At the time of his death, at the age of sixty-three,
he was on sick leave from his position a responsible one as
editor of the Hearst predate service. Even his obituaries did

270 NOTES

not include a full list of the papers where he had worked, in
addition to the Star, during his forty years in American jour-
nalism: the Chicago Tribune, Boston Record, New York Daily
News, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Rocky Mountain News,
Milwaukee Sentinel, New Orleans Item, Los Angeles Exam-
iner, and the Los Angeles Express, of which he was for a time
city editor. During the 1930's Moise was both city editor and,
later, an editorial writer on the Wisconsin News.

8. Paul W. Fisher to CAF, April 2, 1952. Mr. Fisher was the re-
porter who interviewed Hemingway for the Kansas City
Times in November, 1940. See footnote 5, above.

9. Kansas City Star, March 1, 1918, 1.

10. These two sketches were first published among the other un-
titled vignettes of Hemingway's second expatriate volume, in
our time (Three Mountains Press, 1924), chapters 10-11. See
Chapter Eleven for a more complete discussion of the in our
time vignettes. Hereafter cited as in our time.

11. Kansas City Star, July 17, 1917, 8.

12. Idem.

13. in our time, 17.

14. Ibid., 28-9.

15. Brumback, 1C.

16. Idem.

17. There are a number of other forceful, less extended uses of his
Kansas City experience throughout Hemingway's mature
work, additional evidence that the importance of the period
to him cannot be measured accurately by its relative brevity.

18. See Chapter Nine for a description of this episode.

CHAPTER THREE

In the preparation of this chapter I became obligated to the
following individuals for help and advice: Professor Charles
M. Bakewell; J. Charles Edgar; Mrs. Charles W. Fyfe; William D.
Home, Jr.; Charles P. LeMieux, Regional Director, American Red
Cross; Mrs. Dorothy R. McGlone; Marguerite M. Schwarz; Zal-
mon G. Simmons, Jr.; William B. Smith; and Frederick W. Spiegel.

1. Brumback, 1C.

2. Kansas City Star, May 13, 1918, 4.

3. For a more complete history of the American Field Service,
see Charles A. Fenton, "Ambulance Drivers in France and
Italy: 1914-1918," American Quarterly, HI (Winter, 1951),
326-43.

NOTES 271

4. Charles M. Bakewell, The Story of the American Red Cross
in Italy (Macmillan, 1920), 223-24. Professor Bakewell, Shel-
don Clark Professor Emerims of Philosophy at Yale Univer-
sity, was a member of the Public Information Department of
the Red Cross in Italy in 1918. His volume is the only com-
plete account of Red Cross activities in Italy in World War I,
although it should be supplemented by Red Cross bulletins and
reports.

5. Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (Scribner's, 1935),
70.

6. Brumback, 1C. The remainder of the account of the trip to
Europe and the events in Paris is based upon this article.

7. Kansas City Star, July 14, 1918, 5 A. Hereafter cited as Star.

8. Ernest Hemingway, "A Natural History of the Dead," Win-
ner Take Nothing (Scribner's, 1933), 140. The story, which
had no magazine publication, originally appeared the year be-
fore as part of one of the dialogues with the old lady of
DITA.

9. Star.

10. Ciao (June, 1918), [1].

11. Ibid., [3].

12. Brumback, 2C.

13. Star.

14. Oak Leaves, August 10, 1918, 56. Brumback's letter to Doctor
Hemingway was reprinted in the Oak Park weekly news-
paper as part of an article about Hemingway.

15. Idem.

16. Current Biography: 1948 (H. W. Wilson Co., 1949), 409.

17. Oak Leaves, October 5, 1918, 12.

18. Ibid., August 10, 1918, 56.

19. Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, December 21, 1926.
Baker, 4n.

20. Frederic Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune (Piazza
Press, 1929). The novel, one of the most memorable of World
War I, was published anonymously. Manning was a member
of London and Paris avant garde groups. He died in 1935.
There was only one edition of the original version. In 1930
there appeared another edition, "with certain prunings and
excisions," under the title, Her Privates We, this time with
Private 19022 listed as its author.

21. Ernest Hemingway, "Introduction," Men at War (Crown,
1942), xvi.

22. Ibid., xiv.

23. Ibid., xiii-xiv.

24. Oak Leaves, October 5, 1918, 12.

272 NOTES

25. Ibid., 13.

26. Dorothy Vandercook, "For Whom the Bell Tolled," Chicago
Tribune, December 3, 1940, 14. This letter by a grammar
school classmate was sent to the reporter then writing the
Tribune's famous "Line o' Type" column. It was occasioned
by the columnist's erroneous reflection, a few days earlier,
that Hemingway had never used his Chicago background in
any of his fiction.

27. Ernest Hemingway, "Soldier's Home," Contact Collection of
Contemporary Writers (Contact Publishing Company, 1925),
86.

28. Brumback, 2C.

29. Ernest Hemingway, "Up in Michigan," Three Stories & Ten
Poems (Contact Publishing Company, 1923), 3-10. See Chapter
Seven for additional comment on this story.

CHAPTER FOUR

The testimony of Gregory Clark and the late J. Herbert Cranston
is drawn from the author's correspondence and/or interviews with
them, from Mr. Cranston's posthumous autobiography, Ink On My
Fingers (Ryerson Press, 1953), and from three articles: Herbert
Cranston, "Hemingway's Early Days," Midland (Ont.) Free Press
Herald (October 17, 1945), 2, and "When Hemingway Earned
Half a Cent a Word on the Toronto Star," New York Herald
Tribune Book Review (January 13, 1952), 6; and Gregory Clark,
"Hemingway Slept Here," Montreal Standard (November 4,
1950), 13-14. In addition to my debts to Mr. Clark and Mr. Crans-
ton, as well as to Mr. W. H. Cranston for permission to quote
from his father's correspondence, I am also obligated to the fol-
lowing individuals: Nathaniel A. Benson; Arthur S. Bourinot; the
late Augustus Bridle; Ralph B. Cowan; Alan Creighton; William
Arthur Deacon; Merrill Denison; Grant Dexter; Wilfred Eggles-
ton; Roben: A. Farquharson; Edward M. Gundy; Wellington J.
Jeffers; Professor Fred Landon; J. V. McAree; D. C. Me Arthur;
W. L. McGeary; Professor Kenneth MacLean; Carlton McNaught;
J. A. McNeil; Keith Munro; Mark E. Nichols; Lome Pierce;
Gillis Purcell; Emerson B. Reid; David B. Rogers; Bernard K.
Sandwell; Charles Vining; Claire Wallace; Clifford Wallace; and
John Winterbottom.

1. J. Herbert Cranston to CAF, August 7, 1951. Mr. Cranston
was assistant managing editor of the Toronto DS when the
weekend edition, the Toronto SW, was launched in 1910. In

NOTES 273

1911 he was transferred to the new publication as its editor.
He remained in charge until his resignation in 1932. He died
in Midland, Ontario, in December, 1952.

2. Gregory Clark to CAF, June 19, 1952 (Int.). Gregory Clark
was not only the SW's feature editor in 1920, but also one of
its outstanding staff writers. He has become widely known and
respected as a Canadian newspaperman, war correspondent,
and radio writer. In Toronto he is regarded as the unofficial
keeper of the narrative and legends of Hemingway's Canadian
period.

3. SW, February 14, 1920, 7. Verification of this article as Hem-
ingway's comes from the Star's pay records. The indifferent
proofreading of both the DS and the SW particularly the
former is a convincing symptom of their casual professional
standards. Spelling mistakes have been silently corrected, al-
though English-Canadian variations of American spellings are
retained. The punctuation has not been altered save in the
case of extreme and confusing errors.

4. Ibid., March 6, 1920, 13.

5. Ibid., March 13, 1920, 11.

6. Ibid., April 10, 1920, 17.

7. Ibid., March 13, 1920, 10.

8. Ibid., April 24, 1920, 13.

9. For the student of Hemingway's metaphor there are signifi-
cant parallels between this section of the 1920 SW article and
the long, provocative short story written in 1924, "Big Two-
Hearted River," particularly in terms of the ritualistic therapy
so important to the story's theme.

10. SW, June 26, 1920, 17; ibid., August 5, 1920, 11.

11. Ibid., August 28, 1920, 24.

12. Ibid., November 20, 1920, 25-26.

13. Ibid., April 10, 1920, 12.

14. Ibid., April 24, 1920, 11.

15. Lionel Moise was a bona fide expert on the hobo world. A
veteran of the Kansas City Star, who watched his local arrivals
and departures for fifteen years, remembered that Moise "had
visited probably every hobo jungle between the Pacific Coast
and Kansas City." Once when a tramp came to the Star with
an intriguing but fantastic story, he was automatically turned
over to Moise for interrogation. Moise and the bum conversed
in a dialect of jungle language, entirely unintelligible to the
other reporters. After a few minutes Moise pronounced the
story authentic and it was used in the next edition.

16. SW, April 3, 1920, 9, 12.

17. Ibid., June 5, 1920, 1 (General Section).

274 NOTES

18. Ibid., December 11, 1920, 25-26.

19. Cranston said in an article describing his association with
Hemingway that the American "wrote some twenty-four
pieces" for the SW in 1920. Cranston kept his own books
during this period; he derived the figures from these records
and from the payment entries in the Star's own accounts. If
Hemingway did sell nine additional articles to the SW in
1920 they were either brief ones, without by-lines which is
unlikely, since by-lines were lavishly given or were bought
but never printed. The second alternative is more probable;
it would nave been consistent with Cranston's generosity
toward his contributors. The discrepancy may also arise in
part, on the other hand, from the inclusion in Cranston's fig-
ures of some or all of the seven by-lined articles the SW
bought from Hemingway in 1921. See Chapter Five.

20. In January, 1952, in his Herald Tribune article, Cranston cited
half a cent a word as "our regular rate on the SW in those
early days." In a letter of August 7, 1951 to the author, he
said, "I think I paid him about 34 a cent a word to begin with,
which later reached one cent."

CHAPTER FIVE

It is both a pleasure and an embarrassment to acknowledge in
several cases for the second or third time the generous help I
received from the following individuals in the preparation of this
chapter: Gregory Clark; the late J. Herbert Cranston; Roy Dickey;
William D. Home, Jr.; Professor Norman F. Maclean; Florence E.
Parker, Specialist on Cooperatives, Bureau of Labor Statistics, U. S.
Department of Labor; William B. Smith; Y. K. Smith; Jerry
Voorhis, Executive Secretary, Cooperative League of the United
States of America; Dr. James Peter Warbasse; Professor Colston E.
Warne, Department of Economics, Amherst College; and Donald
M. Wright.

1. H. Rappaport, "False Cooperatives and a $15,000,000 Shell-
Game," Nation, CXIH (October 19, 1921), 447. Hereafter
cited as Nation.

2. During the 1940's Harrison Parker emerged from retirement
as the self-styled hereditary chancellor of The Puritan Church.
He was reported to have taken in over $230,000 through a
puzzle contest to raise a "building fund." The Appellate Court
of Illinois ruled that "no Puritan Church, no theology, con-
gregation or services existed," and that Parker, his wife, and

NOTES 275

sister constituted the "governing body." The court ordered
Parker to return the contributions of five complainants. The
federal government thereupon filed an income tax lien for
$39,184.24 against The Puritan Church for taxes allegedly due
on its income between 1945 and 1948.

3. "The Co-operative Society of America," Co-operation, VII
(July, 1921), 118. Co-operation, a monthly publication of the
Cooperative League of the United States of America, was
edited by Dr. James P. Warbasse, an effective enemy of spuri-
ous co-operatives.

4. Nation, 447.

5. Y. K. Smith was at this time about forty years old. He has had
an extensive career in the advertising business, and was for
many years copy chief of the New York office of D'Arcy
Advertising Company, a St. Louis agency, one of the larger
American advertising organizations.

6. [Donald M. Wright], "A Mid-Western Ad Man Remembers,"
Advertising & Selling, XXVIII (March 25, 1937), 54. Donald
Wright is now a free-lance writer. Hereafter cited as "Mid-
Western Ad Man."

7. Ernest M. Hemingway, "A Divine Gesture," Double-Dealer,
III (May, 1922), 267-68. Almost thirty years later Heming-
way returned briefly to this genre with two fables, "The Good
Lion" and "The Faithful Bull," Holiday, IX (March, 1951),
[50-51]. "The Good Lion" is reprinted in The Hemingway
Reader, ed. Charles Poore (Scribner's, 1953), 611-14.

8. Ernest M. Hemingway, "Ultimately," Double-Dealer, III
(June, 1922), 337.

9. Sherwood Anderson, Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs (Har-
court, Brace, 1942), 474-75. Hereafter cited as Memoirs.

10. Co-operative Commonwealth, II (September, 1920), 3.

11. "Mid-Western Ad Man," 54, 58.

12. SW, May 21, 1921, 21; ibid., August 20, 1921, 22; ibid., De-
cember 17, 1921, 15.

13. Ibid., July 2, 1921, 21.

14. Ibid., February 19, 1921, 13.

15. The misspelling occurred in the articles of February 19, May
21, July 2, August 20, and December 7 in the five articles,
in other words, which were set up as columns.

16. SW, May 21, 1921, 21.

17. Ibid., February 19, 1921, 13.

18. Ibid., July 2, 1921, 21.

19. Ibid., February 19, 1921, 13.

20. Ibid., November 12, 1921, 11.

21. Ibid., May 28, 1921, 21.

276 NOTES

22. Ibid., December 17, 1921, 15.

23. The Toronto Star Reference Library.

24. John Bone died in 1928. He had some of Pete Wellington's
qualities dedication to the paper, absorption in his profession,
rigid insistence on a responsible level of performance but he
lacked the Kansas City editor's consuming regard for good
writing. Although Bone was invariably astute in the recogni-
tion of talent, his primary concerns were the expansion of the
Star's circulation and the solidification of his own personal
position. There is no evidence that he ever attempted to in-
fluence Hemingway's style or treatment of material, or that
he regarded Hemingway as a promising creative writer. He
simply saw in the young American's lively gifts an inexpensive
way of making the Star more readable.

25. Harvey Breit, u Talk with Ernest Hemingway," New York
Times Book Review (September 7, 1952), 20.

26. Memoirs, 473.

CHAPTER SIX

1. Sherwood Anderson to Lewis Galantiere, November 28, 1921.
Letters of Sherwood Anderson, ed. Howard Mumford Jones &
Walter B. Rideout (Little, Brown, 1953), 82-3.

2. EH to Sherwood Anderson, no date. The letter was written
from Paris, shortly before Christmas, 1921.

3. Carlton McNaught, Canada Gets the News (Ryerson Press,
1940), 145-46.

4. SW, February 18, 1922, 15.

5. Ibid., February 4, 1922, 3.

6. Ibid., March 4, 1922, 25.

7. Ibid., March 25, 1922, 15.

8. Robert McAlmon to Norman Holmes Pearson, February 28,
1952.

9. EH to Sherwood Anderson, March 9, 1922.

10. SW, March 18, 1922, 12; ibid., March 4, 1922, 3.

11. Ibid., March 11, 1922, 12.

12. Ibid., 13.

13. Ibid., March 18, 1922, 15.

14. Ibid., March 25, 1922, 22.

15. Ibid., 3.

16. Ibid., April 15, 1922, 29.

17. DS, April 13, 1922, 17.

18. Ibid., April 10, 1922, 1.

19. Ibid., April 24, 1922, 1, 2

NOTES 277

20. Ibid., 2.

21. Ibid., April 18, 1922, 1.

22. Ibid., June 10, 1922, 5.

23. Ibid., June 24, 1922, 16; SW, June 24, 1922, 5.

24. See Chapter Nine.

25. See Chapter Eleven.

26. SW y August 12, 1922, 11.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Many people contributed immeasurably to this and the previous
chapter, including Louis Henry Cohn; Max Eastman; Wilbur For-
rest; Otis L. Guernsey, Jr.; Mrs. Guy Hickok; Thayer Jaccaci;
Harold Loeb; Frank Mason; and Professor Carl F. Schreiber. I am
also indebted to Stanley Pargellis and the staff of The Newberry
Library for their kindnesses, and to Mr. Pargellis for permission to
quote from the Library's unpublished correspondence between
Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. I am similarly obligated to
Carl Van Vechten as executor of the Gertrude Stein papers in the
Yale Collection of American Literature, and to Donald Gallup and
Alfred A. Knopf as editor and publisher of letters written to Miss
Stein; and to Edmund Wilson for permission to quote from the
Hemingway correspondence printed in Mr. Wilson's The Shores
of Light. My greatest debt is to Professor Norman Holmes Pear-
son for the patience with which he shared and clarified his ideas
about Stein's work; the general pattern and treatment of her lit-
erary relationship with Hemingway, and some details I have cited,
I owe to "Gertrude Stein and Writing on Writing," a lecture
given by Professor Pearson on November 7, 1952 as a Peters Rush-
ton Seminar at the University of Virginia.

1. John Peale Bishop, "Homage to Hemingway," New Republic,
LXXXIX (November 11, 1936), 40. Bishop quoted Heming-
way directly: "Ezra [Pound] was right half the time, and
when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any
doubt about it. Gertrude was always right."

2. EH to Sherwood Anderson, May 23, 1922.

3. In Our Time was published in New York in September, 1925.
The finished manuscript had been sent to New York, to
Donald Ogden Stewart, in September, 1924. The five Euro-
pean stories therefore become, in terms of acquiring the ex-
perience, largely the product of 1922, the first six months of
1923 the Hemingways returned to Canada in August, 1923
and part of 1924. During 1922, in other words, Hemingway

278 NOTES

accumulated at least the outlines of the material for such
stories as "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot," which dealt with an ex-
patriate poet; "Cat in the Rain," with its portrait of a young
American couple in Italy; the Tyrolese story, "Out of Season,"
which included another aspect of expatriation; the sketch of
expatriate response to a return to the United States, "Cross
Country Snow"; and "My Old Man," the long narrative about
an expatriate American jockey and his son.

4. EH to Sherwood Anderson, March 9, 1922.

5. Gertrude Stein to Sherwood Anderson, undated letter [spring,
1922]. "[Hemingway] is a delightful fellow," Miss Stein told
Anderson, "and I like his talk. . . ."

6. Toklas, 260.

7. William L. Phillips, "How Sherwood Anderson Wrote Wines-
burg, Ohio" American Literature, XXIII (March, 1951), [7]-
30.

8. Frank Mason to CAP, September 17, 1952 (Int.). Mason re-
mained in charge of the Paris office of I.N.S. until 1926. He
is regarded by survivors of the period, including himself, as
the original of the American newspaperman named Krum who
appears briefly in Chapter Five of The Sun Also Rises.

9. Guy Hickok died in 1951. It was with Hickok that Heming-
way made, in the former's Ford, the trip through Italy that
resulted in the 1927 short story, "Che Ti Dice La Patria?"
Mr. Hickok was associated with the Voice of America at the
time of his death. Prior to this he had been Program Director
of NBC's International Division.

10. EH to Edmund Wilson, November 25, 1923. Edmund Wilson,
The Shores of Light (Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952), 117.

11. Ibid., 118.

12. Gertrude Stein, "How Writing Is Written," The Oxford
Anthology of American Literature, II, ed. William Rose
Benet and Norman Holmes Pearson (Oxford University Press,
1938), 1451. Hereafter cited as Oxford.

13. EH to Sherwood Anderson, May 23, 1922.

14. Oxford, 1447.

15. Toklas, 266.

16. Idem.

17. Idem.

18. Ernest Hemingway, "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot," In Our Time
(Boni & Liveright, 1925), 109.

19. "Monologue to the Maestro," 174B.

20. Oxford, 1449.

21. EH to Gertrude Stein, August 15 [1924]. The Flowers of
Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein, ed. Donald

NOTES 279

Gallup (Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 165. Hereafter cited as
Gallup.

22. "Monologue to the Maestro," 21.

23. Toklas, 265.

24. EH to Gertrude Stein, August 15 [1924]. Gallup, 164.

25. Gertrude Stein, Narration (Chicago University Press, 1933),
35.

26. William Bird was at this time European manager of the Con-
solidated Press. He was also publishing expatriate work in
Paris; in 1924 he printed Hemingway's in our time.

27. EH to Gertrude Stein, November 9, 1923.

28. DITA, 2.

29. DS, September 9, 1922, 8.

30. Ibid., September 19, 1922, 4.

31. Ibid., September 1, 1922, 23.

32. Ibid., September 2, 1922, 28.

33. Ibid., September 5, 1922, 5.

34. Ibid., September 30, 1922, 9.

35. SW, September 30, 1922, 16.

36. Ernest Hemingway, "An Alpine Idyll," American Caravan, ed.
Van Wyck Brooks et al. (Macaulay, 1927), 46-51.

37. "Old Newsman Writes," 26.

38. Ernest Hemingway, "a.d. Southern Style," Esquire, III (May,
1935), 25.

39. Idem.

CHAPTER EIGHT

1. EH to CAP, September 23, 1951.

2. DS, September 30, 1922, 1.

3. Idem.

4. Ibid., October 23, 1922, 1 (Second Section).

5. Ibid., September 30, 1922, 1.

6. Ibid., October 24, 1922, 1 (Second Section).

7. At this point in the article, in verification of Hemingway's
foresight, the DS news editor inserted a note pointing out that
on the previous day, almost three weeks after Hemingway
wrote his story, a wire service cable had revealed that the
Turks would indeed claim Mesopotamia at the forthcoming
peace conference.

8. DS, October 28, 1922, 1 (Second Section).

9. Ibid., October 9, 1922, 1.

10. Ibid., October 31, 1922, 5.

11. "Monologue to the Maestro," 174B. The first line of Heming-
way's October 9 cable was itself a variation of the opening

280 NOTES

sentence of Kipling's short story about an earlier Russian
threat to Afghanistan, "The Man Who Was": "Let it be
clearly understood," Kipling had begun, "that the Russian is
a delightful person till he tucks in his shirt."

12. Ibid., 21.

13. Ernest Hemingway, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Esquire,
VI (August, 1936), 197.

14. DS, November 3, 1922, 10.

15. Hemingway mailed from Constantinople on October 18 a long
article which was the least impressive of his Near East dis-
patches. It was published in the DS on November 10, on page
12, but in treatment it was an uncharacteristic return to his
loose, SW approach. He presented a grab bag of material
whose various sections were held together only by their
common connection with naval episodes in the Bosphorus. Its
appeal for a Canadian audience was in its obvious admiration
for the Royal Navy. Its paragraphs were hearty and British,
and a reminder that Hemingway was accustomed to being
paid by the word. It was also mildly corrupt as a piece of
journalism, since at no point did he fulfill in any complete
way his avowed, censor-free exposure of naval activities.

16. DS, October 20, 1922, 1 (Second Section).

17. Malcolm Cowley, "A Portrait of Mister Papa," Ernest Hem-
ingivay: The Man and His Work, ed. John K. M. McCaffery
(World, 1950), 49.

18. DITA,4.

19. EH to CAP, September 23, 1951. In 1934, in an angry de-
nunciation of the complacent indignation of literary critics
about the depression, Hemingway defined his position sim-
ilarly when he declared that "things were in just as bad shape,
and worse, as far as vileness, injustice and rottenness are con-
cerned, in 1921, '22 and '23 as they are now. . . ." "Old News-
man Writes," 25.

20. See Chapter Eleven for a more complete discussion of this
1922 dispatch and its relationship to the vignettes of in our
time.

21. DS, November 14, 1922, 7.

22. DITA, 3.

23. Ernest Hemingway, "Introduction by the Author," In Our
Time (Scribner's, 1930), 9-12. The sketch was retitled "On the
Quai at Smyrna" in the 1938 collection of all Hemingway's
short stories through that date [Ernest Hemingway, The Fifth
Column and the First Forty -Nine Stories (Scribner's, 1938),
185-86], and retains this title in subsequent publication.

24. DITA, 2, 135.

NOTES 281

25. Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (Har-
court, Brace, 1931), 834.

26. Frank Mason's recollection thirty years later was that Hem-
ingway cabled him relatively little material; most of it, he
added, was of no particular use to a syndicate primarily in-
terested in spot news. Mason felt that he did remember one
eloquent paragraph dealing with a refugee scene.

27. "Old Newsman Writes," 25.

CHAPTER NINE

The help of the following individuals was generously available to
me in the preparation of the two chapters Eight and Nine on
the Near East Assignment: Charles F. Bertelli; Constantine Brown;
Robert McAlmon; Frank Mason; Mrs. Paul Scott Mowrer; G.
Ward Price; Henry Wales; and Basil Woon.

1. George Slocombe, The Tumult and the Shouting (Macmillan,
1936), 191-92. Slocombe represented the London Daily Herald
at Lausanne. In 1946 he became literary editor of the Euro-
pean edition of the New York Herald Tribune.

2. Henry Wales to CAF, August 7, 1952. Mr. Wales succeeded
Floyd Gibbons as the Chicago Tribune's chief European cor-
respondent.

3. Charles F. Bertelli to CAF, August 19, 1952.

4. "Malady of Power," 31.

5. Ludwell Denny, "Up in Curzon's Room," Nation, CXVI
(January 10, 1923), 40.

6. "Malady of Power," 31.

7. Ernest Hemingway, "They All Want Peace What Is
Peace?" Little Review, IX (Spring, 1923), 20-21.

8. EH to Edmund Wilson, November 25, 1923. Edmund Wil-
son, The Shores of Light (Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952),
118.

9. Bolitho's obituary in the New York Herald Tribune two days
after his death in France on June 2, 1930 was a full column
long. It discussed in some detail not only his colorful career
but also his work and personality. The obituary quoted from
his journalism to illustrate his "knack for polishing off a per-
son with a single, compact . . . epigrammatic phrase." Bolitho's
style, in other words, was a journalistic rendition of the sort
of thing Gertrude Stein was doing and teaching in a more
literary way. Hemingway's Lausanne poem echoes such Ryal-
lisms as, "Hoover will make a good President because he does

282 NOTES

not know how to enjoy himself," and "Ramsay MacDonald is
a swell political barytone."

10. "Malady of Power," 31.

11. Idem.

12. William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods (Simon and
Schuster, 1929). This collection of studies of a variety of his-
torical figures, ranging from Alexander the Great through
Casanova, Isadora Duncan, and Woodrow Wilson, was Boli-
tho's greatest success. His theme was that the adventurer is
an outlaw. "Adventure," he wrote in his Introduction, "must
start with running away from home." For a portrait of
Bolitho which confirms and extends the kind of personal in-
fluence he exerted, see Sisley Huddleston, Back to Montpar-
nasse (Lippincott, 1931), 250-54.

13. "Malady of Power," 31.

14. Walter Duranty, / Write as I Please (Simon and Schuster,
1935), 95, 169.

15. Ibid., 95.

16. William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods (Readers Club,
1941), ix.

17. Ibid. (Modern Age Books, 1937), viii.

18. "Malady of Power," 199.

19. Ibid., 31.

20. Ibid., 31, 198. Also, G. Ward Price to CAF, August 30, 1952.
Mr. Price is still a featured correspondent for the Daily Mail.

21. Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (Har-
court, Brace, 1931), 834.

22. Hadley R. Mowrer to CAF, March 25, 1952. Hemingway said
in 1951 that he "felt so badly about the loss that II] would
almost have resorted to surgery in order to forget it." Baker,
12. See also Hemingway's preface to Lee Samuels, A Heming-
way Check List (Scribner's, 1951).

23. DS, January 27, 1923, 11.

24. EH to CAF, July 29, 1952.

25. Hemingway had mentioned Bottomley earlier in 1922, briefly,
in the article on Rhone Canal fishing, DS, June 10, 5. Hem-
ingway there explained that he was carrying a copy of the
London Daily Mail to wrap the fish in. At sundown, he wrote,
the moment arrived at which "to rewrap the trout in Lord
NorthclifFe's latest speech . . . and, saving the Bottomley case
to read on the train going home, put the trout filled paper
in your jacket pocket."

26. The majority of American estimates of Mussolini, with the
notable exception of a New York World series by Bolitho,
were distinctly enthusiastic and admiring.

NOTES 283

27. Time, XXXV (June 24, 1940), 92.

28. DS, February 10, 1923, 2.

29. Robert McAlmon to Norman Holmes Pearson, February 28,
1952.

30. See Chapter Eleven.

CHAPTER TEN

1. "Old Newsman Writes," 25.

2. For a check list of this material, as well as a comprehensive
description and analysis of the Spanish Civil War period, see
Baker.

3. SW, April 14, 1923, 2.

4. DS, April 14, 1923, 4.

5. Ibid., April 18, 1923, 1, 4.

6. Ibid., April 21, 1923, 1, 7.

7. SW, April 14, 1923, 2.

8. Ernest Hemingway, "A Paris Letter," Esquire, I (February,
1934), 156.

9. Ernest Hemingway, "a.d. Southern Style: A Key West Let-
ter," Esquire, III (May, 1935), 25.

10. DS, May 1, 1923, 1, 28.

11. Ibid., April 25, 1923, 1, 2.

12. Ibid., April 28, 1923, 1, 2.

13. Ibid., May 5, 1923, 1, 34.

14. Ibid., May 9, 1923, 1 (Second Section).

15. Ibid., May 12, 1923, 1 (Second Section).

16. Ibid., May 16, 1923, 1 (Second Section).

17. Ibid., May 12, 1923, 1 (Second Section).

18. Ibid., May 16, 1923, 1 (Second Section).

19. SW, April 14, 1923, 2.

20. Idem.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

1. Archibald MacLeish, "Years of the Dog," ACT FIVE and
Other Poems (Random House, 1948), 53.

2. EH to Edmund Wilson, November 25, 1923. Edmund Wilson,
The Shores of Light (Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952), 117.

3. Harvey Breit, "Talk with Mr. Hemingway," New York Times
Book Review, LV (September 17, 1950), 14.

4. Cohn, 16.

284 NOTES

5. Ernest Hemingway, Three Stories & Ten Poems (Contact
Publishing Company, 1923). The stories were "Up in Michi-
gan," "Out of Season," and "My Old Man." Six of the ten
poems had been published in Poetry , XXI (January, 1923),
193-95. The pamphlet was originally advertised in the spring
of 1923 as 2 Stories & 10 Poems. McAlmon described the series
as a whole as "dedicated to the idea that artists need not please
either money-making publishers, or a main street public."
There were three hundred copies printed, many of which
Hemingway distributed himself; the pamphlet was also on
sale at Sylvia Beach's Paris bookstore.

6. The critical reception of Three Stories & Ten Poems, in fact,
was characteristic of the fate of most expatriate volumes of
the period. The only public recognition the pamphlet received
in 1923 was a short paragraph by Burton Rascoe in his New
York Tribune column, "A Bookman's Daybook," in which he
mentioned having received a copy from Lewis Galantiere,
adding that he had "not yet gotten around to reading it."

7. Edmund Wilson, "Mr. Hemingway's Dry-Points," Dial,
LXXVII (October, 1924), 340-41. Hereafter cited as Dial.

8. Ibid., 340.

9. Ernest Hemingway, "Homage to Ezra," This Quarter, I
(May, 1925), 222.

10. Harvey Breit, "Talk with Mr. Hemingway," New York Times
Book Review, LV (September 17, 1950), 14.

11. Like several of his contemporaries Fitzgerald, for example, as
well as Faulkner and Dos Passos Hemingway wrote a mod-
erate amount of verse in the process of becoming a prose
writer. In 1923 he was thinking of his own work in such terms
that Poetry could describe him as "a young Chicago poet now
abroad," who would "soon issue in Paris his first book of
verse." Until the publication of the first six vignettes of in our
time by the Little Review in April, 1923, in fact, Hemingway's
published creative work had been almost exclusively verse. His
response to the variety of Paris associations, to Ezra Pound, to
Miss Stein, and to the imagists as a school, is apparent in the
changing contours of his poetry.

By and large, the poems were least successful when they
seemed to derive most self-consciously from Hemingway's
fidelity to the imagist doctrine. When he applied the ideology
to a deeply felt, rather than a literary experience as, for ex-
ample, in the brief "Captives," where the metaphor was the
Thracian refugee procession his use of the discipline was
more forceful. The gerunds, at least, are reminders that
whether he was writing prose or poetry he was working in

NOTES 285

the aura of Gertrude Stein; for her, as for Pound, the two
mediums had essentially the same objective. "Do not tell in
mediocre verse," Pound had said, "what has already been
done in good prose." The better poems also have the lucidity,
as well as the meter and rhyme sometimes, of a Kipling or
Housman refrain. The least flabby were those whose material
dealt with the themes which would emerge so forcefully in
his early fiction; his sketches and short stories existed in
miniature in the verses about war, politics, and boyhood.

12. These poems are particularly interesting as an early introduc-
tion of the motif which would dominate most of the fiction
of Hemingway's first period. This was the thesis which ap-
peared in In Our Time in 1925, where a Michigan boyhood
is seen to equate with adult crime and violence and pain. The
two components of experience, the past and the present,
lacked the subtlety of balanced restraint that made In Our
Time's counterpoint so strong, but the poems had a slick
finish of technical glitter, as well as the idiomatic strength of
his short stories.

13. Like Three Stories & Ten Poems , in our time was part of a
series of uniform volumes. In this case it was a more formal
sequence, an "Inquest into the state of contemporary English
prose," edited by Ezra Pound. Hemingway's was the sixth and
final volume. Six of the eighteen vignettes were evidently
written between December, 1922, when Hemingway's early
work was lost in Paris, and April, 1923, when this initial in our
time material was printed in the Little Review. The remain-
ing twelve were written prior to the middle of July, 1923,
when Hemingway delivered the manuscript of in our time.

14. Cohn, 21.

15. DITA, 2.

16. Ernest Hemingway, "In Our Time," Little Review, IX (April,
1923), 3-5.

17. DS, October 20, 1922, 1 (Second Section).

18. Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (Har-
court, Brace, 1931), 834.

19. DITA, 2.

20. Ibid., 192.

21. The gerund was retained in the Scribner 1927 edition of In
Our Time. The 1930 edition reverted to the in our time form,
as have subsequent editions.

22. This particular revision actually went through four drafts
rather than three. On October 23, 1922, three days after send-
ing the cable from Adrianople, Hemingway mailed from Sofia
a long dispatch about the refugee procession. In it he began

286 NOTES

the condensation of detail. "I walked five miles with the
refugees [sic] procession along the road, dodging camels, that
swayed and grunted along, past flat wheeled ox carts piled
high with bedding, mirrors, furniture, pigs tied flat, mothers
huddled under blankets with their babies, old men and
women. . . ." DS, November 14, 1922, 7.

23. Idem.

24. SW, October 20, 1923, 1 (Magazine Section).

25. Ibid., September 15, 1923, 1 (Magazine Section).

26. Dial, 341.

CHAPTER TWELVE

My thanks to Morley Callaghan, Gregory Clark, and the late J.
Herbert Cranston must be renewed at this point, even before I
make grateful acknowledgment of the generous help of Clifton W.
Barrett; Ralph Foster; Peter B. Kyne; O. E. McGillicuddy; Ver-
non McKenzie; Mrs. Paul Scott Mowrer; Donald and Mary Ross;
and Allan Wade.

1. Gertrude Stein to Sherwood Anderson, undated letter (early
1924).

2. The most accurate published estimate of Mr. Hindmarsh is
Pierre Berton, "Hindmarsh of The Star," Maclean's, LXV
(April 1, 1952), 16-17, 37-40, 42.

3. Ibid., 42.

4. Morley Callaghan to CAP, June 19, 1952 (Int.). Callaghan
was never a disciple of Hemingway in the patronizing sense
with which most literary criticism has belittled the Canadian.
His talent was wholly different, Celtic and imaginative, and his
style has grown steadily in individuality. The critical dis-
missal of him as no more than a Hemingway imitator derived
largely from the fact that his early material was often drawn
from a reporter's world; like Hemingway, he frequently wrote
about whores and cops and athletes. For an account of the
quarrel between Hemingway and Callaghan, see Arthur Miz-
ener, The Far Side of Paradise (Houghton, Mifflin, 1951), 212-
13. See also, for Callaghan's version, Jock Carroll, "I Never
Knocked Out Hemingway," Montreal Standard (March 31,
1951), 9, 25.

5. Mary Lowry Ross to CAP, June 20, 1952 (Int.). Much of Mrs.
Ross's work for the Star in 1923 was feature material for the
SW, but she also covered sometimes with Hemingway as her
partner straight news assignments for the DS.

NOTES 287

6. DS, September 25, 1923, 4.

7. Joseph Atkinson died in Toronto in 1948. Although Harry
Hindmarsh succeeded him as President, Atkinson willed the
material assets of The Toronto Star Limited to a group of
trustees, with a number of Ontario charities as beneficiaries
of the trust. See Pierre Berton, "The Greatest Three-Cent
Show on Earth," Maclean's, LXV (March 15, 1952), 7-9,
57-60.

8. The circulation techniques of the Star were lampooned about
this time by two Toronto newspapermen, during a period
when the Star was publishing, with a lavish advertising budget,
Dickens's Life of Christ, a Life of Edith Cavell, Dickens's
Love Letters, and gruesome photographs of French battle-
fields.

To Hindmarsh and Knowles

Mr. Atkinson spoke,
If we don't sell more papers the Star

will go broke;
I've three super-salesmen who say

they can sell,
They're Jesus and Dickens and Edith

Cavell.

Come fill up our columns with sob-stuff

and sex,
Shed tears by the gallons and slush

by the pecks,
Let the presses revolve like the

mill-tails of Hell
For Jesus and Dickens and Edith

Cavell.

Then hey for the paper that strives

for the best.
(If Jesus makes good we'll put over

Mae West)
With cuties and comics and corpses

and smell.
And Jesus and Dickens and Edith

Cavell.

9. SW, September 14, 1923, 1 (Magazine Section).

10. On October 4, a few days after Hemingway's story about the
Sudbury coal fields, the DS used, unsigned, his interview in
Toronto with Lord Birkenhead. Hemingway's theme was that

288 NOTES

"Lord Birkenhead, the austere, unapproachable, super-cynical,
and supercilious Earl of Birkenhead, is a myth." He then dem-
onstrated the invariably successful illusion, journalistically
speaking, that the Lord High Chancellor was in reality just
like the DS's readers, only more so. "In fact," Hemingway
wrote knowledgeably, "in his flannels and striped tie he looked
not unlike one of the Leander rowing men, except, of course,
for a slight discrepancy at the waist." DS, October 4, 1923, 12.

11. Dr. Lome Pierce, editor since 1920 of the distinguished To-
ronto publishing house, The Ryerson Press, recalls that "I read
[Hemingway] regularly. ... I was interested in what he had
to say, and in the way he said it. . . ."

12. SW, October 20, 1923, 1 (Magazine Section); ibid, October
27, 1923, 1 (Magazine Section).

13. Ibid., November 3, 1923, 20; ibid., November 17, 1923, 19;
ibid., January 12, 1924, 20.

14. Ibid., November 17, 1923, 19.

15. John Hadley was the Christian name of the Hemingways' son,
born in Toronto on October 10, 1923.

16. SW, November 17, 1923, 18; ibid., November 24, 1923, 19;
ibid., December 15, 1923, 1 (Magazine Section); ibid., Decem-
ber 1, 1923, 1 (Magazine Section).

17. EH to Ernest Walsh and Ethel Morehead, undated letter
(1925). Mr. Walsh and Miss Morehead were the editors of
This Quarter, which published such early Hemingway stories
as "The Undefeated" and "Big Two-Hearted River."

18. Mr. O. E. McGillicuddy, a reporter on the DS in 1923, and
later an editor of the Toronto Globe and Mail, said in 1952,
in this same connection, that Hemingway "heartily disliked
routine assignments, but could really write a good colour or
feature article when given the time he felt he required."

19. SW, November 24, 1923, 35.

20. Excellent as it was, the Yeats article had a darker side. Several
weeks later Hemingway wrote another story about the Irish
poet. It had none of the clarity of its predecessor; it was cheap
and vulgar, with no more validity than the paragraphs of a
gossip columnist. Its derisive tone was keyed to his audience's
prejudices; Hemingway portrayed Yeats as an untidy buffoon
who during a lecture tour kept his Toronto host up all
night with his garrulous eccentricities. "He told literary anec-
dotes. He chanted his own poems. He crooned Erse sagas."
SW, December 22, 1923, 35.

On only one occasion, out of the score or more articles he
wrote that fall, did Hemingway match the intensity of the
first Yeats story. An article published under his own by-line

NOTES 289

on December 8 was an expert instrument of controlled satire.
The sustained narrative about the pawnshop market for
second-hand medals was supported by excellent dialogue and
brief, fresh snatches of exposition. SW, December 8, 1923, 21.

21. Ibid., 18.

22. Ibid., December 15, 1923, 21.

23. Ibid., December 22, 1923, 1 (Magazine Section).

24. Ibid., December 29, 1923, 1 (Magazine Section); ibid., 20;
ibid., 20, 21; ibid., January 19, 1924, 19.

25. Ibid., January 19, 1924, 1 (Magazine Section).

26. Hemingway's coverage of the arrival of Lloyd George in New
York and the subsequent official train journey to Montreal was
his largest single assignment during the four months in To-
ronto. Hindmarsh's original plan had been to send three cor-
respondents to Manhattan: Hemingway, Mary Lowry, and
Robert Reade, one of the DS's top reporters and a favorite of
Mr. Atkinson. At the last moment Hemingway was informed
that he would be handling the assignment alone. This was
itself a shock, since the Star always required a great deal of
copy, from all angles, on such a story. Coupled with the fact
of his wife's imminent delivery, it encouraged Hemingway to
regard the entire episode as a deliberately conceived tactic of
personal torment. He did the job competently, however. Ex-
ploiting his previous observation of Lloyd George at Genoa
the year before, he filed seven prominently featured stories
between October 3 and October 6; three of them were long
and detailed, and all but one were by-lined. It was an ex-
hausting assignment in every way; Lloyd George's first day in
New York required Hemingway to be with the story from
early morning at the harbor, through a round of speeches,
lunch, and receptions, and on to the theater that night. Hem-
ingway turned the assignment over to another DS corre-
spondent in Montreal the latter noted in his first dispatch
that Lloyd George's New York program "would wear out any
man" but he wasn't able to get back to Toronto for the
birth of his son; his wife was delivered on October 10, two
weeks prematurely, while Hemingway was on the train from
Montreal. See DS, October 5, 1923, 1; ibid., October 6, 1923, 1;
idem; idem; SW, October 6, 1923, 2; ibid., 3; DS, October 8,
1923, 14.

27. The occasion of Hemingway's letter to the Toronto News-
paper Guild was a personal appeal to him by the late Allen
May, an employee of the Star who had met Hemingway in
Spain, where May served during the Civil War in Dr. Nor-

290 NOTES

man Bethune's blood bank unit. See also, Pierre Berton, "Hind-
marsh of The Star," Maclean's, LXV (April 1, 1952), 38.

28. SW, November 17, 1923, 19.

29. DS, October 6, 1923, 1.

30. SW, October 6, 1923, 2.

31. DS, October 8, 1923, 14. H. G. Wells's Men Like Gods was
published in 1923.

32. SW, December 15, 1923, 21.

INDEX

Adrianople: 172, 182, 183, 184,
185, 229, 232

Advertising & Selling: 108, 275

Afghanistan: 178, 179, 180

Aigle: 141

Aldis, Mrs. Dorothy: 99

Alps: 62

Alsace: 53, 168

A.E.F.: 85

American Caravan: 167

American Civil War: 180

American Field Service: 48, 51,
52-53

American Red Cross: 48, 51, 52

American Red Cross, Ambulance
Corps: 52-55, 59, 61, 62

American Red Cross, Ambulance
Corps, Section IV: 54, 58, 60,
61, 62, 66

American Red Cross, Canteen:
62-63

American Red Cross Hospital,
Milan: 60, 67, 68, 72

American Volunteer Motor-Am-
bulance Corps in France: 52

Anatolia: 181

Anderson, Sherwood: 100, 103-
105,107,116-120,122,126,145-
150, 156, 203, 225, 226, 236, 248

Anderson, Tennessee: 119

Anglo-American Press Associa-
tion: 126

Anteuil: 185

Antonio. (Cunard Line): 261

Aosta: 142

Aponyi, Count: 256

Argosy: 113

Arrens, : 198

Asia Minor. See Greco-Turk

War.

Associated Press: 120
Athens: 237
Atkinson, Joseph E.: 76, 78, 120,

250, 287
Autobiography of Alice B. Tok-

las: 266

B

Baden: 211
Baker, Carlos: 266
Bakewell, Charles M.: 271
Batouala: 132-133
Baudelaire, Charles: 124
Beau Brummell: 10
Beerbohm, Max: 138, 141, 202
Belgium: 217
Bellaria: 130
Berlin: 202

Bertelli, Charles F.: 188-189
Bibliography of the Works of

Ernest Hemingway , A : 266
Biggs, Fannie: 6-10, 31, 47, 157
Bird, William: 159, 225, 229
Birkenhead, 1st Earl of: 287-288
Bismarck, von, Prince Otto: 177
Black Forest: 217,252
Bobbitt, Arthur: 20-24, 26
Bolitho, William: 151, 190-192,

201-205, 281, 282
Bone, John: 116, 133, 142, 160,

169, 170, 171, 174, 177, 184,

187, 203, 204, 205, 207, 220,

222, 244, 245, 250, 276
Book-of-the-Month Club News:

269

Boston Transcript: 250
Bottomley, Horatio: 200, 282

292

INDEX

Boston University: 53

Boxing: 16, 20, 94, 102, 103, 104,

170

Boys' High School Club: 11
Boys' Rifle Club: 11-12
Brooklyn Eagle: 149
Brumbach, Theodore B.: 47, 48,

50, 51, 56, 57, 58, 61, 62, 63, 66,

69,72, 114,266
Bulgaria: 184
Bullfighting: 229, 251, 261
Burke Club: 11,71
Butts, Alexander: 30
Byron, George Gordon, 6th

Baron: 197

Cabelese: 186-187
California, University of: 53
Callaghan, Morley: 148, 246-248,

257, 286

Camelots du Roi: 208
Camping: 26, 28, 87
Canada. See Toronto.
Canadian Press: 120
Caporetto: 113, 182
Cardinella, Sam: 239
Carman, Bliss: 254
Carpentier, Georges: 170
Cezanne, Paul: 154, 157
Chambers, Robert W.: 112
Chamby sur Montreux: 129
Chasseurs Alpins: 47
Chaucer, Geoffrey: 6
Cherbourg: 118
Chicago: 16, 22, 54, 57, 71, 72,

74, 93, 95, 96, 99, 100, 146, 147,

241, 254, 263

Chicago Daily News: 120, 139
Chicago (French Line): 55
Chicago Journal: 72
Chicago Tribune: 22, 23, 95, 188,

272

Chicago, University of: 4, 6, 98

Child, Richard Washburn: 191

Church, Mayor Thomas L.: 86-
87

Ciao: 58-59

Cicero, Illinois: 3

Clark, Gregory: 75, 84, 93, 94,
105, 115, 243, 246, 247, 251,
257, 273

Clemenceau, Georges: 194,211

Cohn, Louis H.: 228, 266

Collins, Michael: 175

Cologne: 166, 205, 211, 218, 219

Columbus, Christopher: 139

Communism: EH on, 136-137

Connable, Ralph: 74, 75

Conrad, Joseph: 41

Constantinople: 171 - 173, 175,
176, 177, 179, 180, 182, 195,
202, 222

Contact Collection of Contem-
porary Writers: 158

Contact Publishing Company:
226

Cooper, Courtney Ryley: 29

Co-operator, The: 97

Co-operative Commonwealth-.
95, 96, 98, 101, 106, 107, 110

Co-operative Society of Amer-
ica: 96-99

Cornell University: 47

Cortina D'Ampezzo: 203

Cowan, James: 262

Cowley, Malcolm: 183

Cranston, J. Herbert: 74, 77, 78,
79, 80, 81, 82, 86, 109, 110, 116,
123, 244, 245, 254, 255, 257,
261, 272-273

Creager, Marvin: 41

Critchfield (Advertising) Agen-
cy: 99, 118

Criqui, Eugene: 213

Grouse, Russel: 33, 35, 39, 40

Cunard, Nancy: 203

Curtis Publishing Company: 29

INDEX

293

Curzon, George Nathaniel, 1st
Marquis Curzon of Kedleston:
189, 190, 201

D

Dada: 185

Daily Star. See Toronto Daily

Star.

Dartmouth College: 53
Daudet, Leon: 208
Denny, Ludwell: 189
Dennison, Merrill: 79-80
Detroit: 93

De Valera, Eamon: 175
Dial, The: 146, 226
Diaz, General Armand: 114
Dickey, Roy: 99
Dijon: 226
Dixon, Margaret: 6-9, 14, 18, 19,

31, 157

Dolomites: 203, 223
Dome: 119, 144
Donaldson, Arthur: 75
Dorman-Smith, Captain Eric

Edward: 238
Dos Passos, John: 99
Double-Dealer, The: 101, 102
Dreiser, Theodore: 41
due d'Orleans: 208
Duranty, Walter: 193, 194
Diisseldorf: 211, 219, 220, 221

Eastern Thrace: 180, 182. See

Greco-Turk War.
Eastman, Max: 138, 139, 141
Edgar, J. Charles (Carl): 28, 36,

48, 72, 114
Eliot, T. S.: 227
England: 53, 99, 178, 204, 208
Esquire: 151, 194
Essen: 219

Europe: 115, 119. See Black For-
est, Italy, Paris, Spain, etc.

Fascism, Fascists. See Italy.
Federal Building (Kansas City,

Mo.): 35

Fisher, Paul W.: 269
Fishing: 20, 26, 28, 72, 87, 122,

141, 252, 257
Fitch, Clyde: 10
Fitzgerald, F. Scott: 149
Fleurs du Mai: 124
Foley, Edith: 99, 100
Football: 7, 19, 20, 268
Forrest, Wilbur: 138, 144
Fossalta: 65, 69
France. See Paris.
France, Anatole: 101, 248
Frankfurt: 211,216
Freiburg: 164, 165
French Transport Corps: 53
Frise, James: 76, 257
Front Page, The: 39

Galantiere, Lewis: 118, 119, 120
Galata. See Constantinople.
Gare du Lyons: 196
Gare du Nord: 56
Gehlmann, John: 22, 24
Genoa: 135-138, 170,222
Genoa Economic Conference:

133-135,202
General Hospital (Kansas City,

Mo.): 33, 34, 35, 36,57
George I (Greece): 240
Germany: 134, 145, 159, 168
G.I. Bill: 71
Gibraltar: 175
Gilday, John Patrick: 38
Girls 7 Rifle Club: 11

294

INDEX

Giuseppe Verdi (Italian Line):

69

Godfrey, Harry: 40
Goncourt Prize: 132
Gordon, Sir Charles Blair: 140
Goya y Lucientes, de, Francisco:

239

Great Lakes Naval Station: 71
Greece. See Greco-Turk War.
Greco-Turk War: 67, 170, 183,

184, 186, 202, 244, 237
Griffin, Fred: 93, 94, 251
Griffith, Arthur: 175
Guerber, H. A., Myths of

Greece and Rome: 5

H

Hadley, John: 253

Halifax: 121

Halley's Comet: 39

Halton, Matthew: 120

Hamid Bey: 177

HannaClub: 11

Hartley, Marsden: 226

Haskell, Henry J., Sr.: 29, 269

Harding, Warren: 108

Harper's Magazine: 53

Harvard University: 54

Hearst, W. R.: 29, 77, 143, 187,
250. See International News
Service, Universal News Serv-
ice.

Hecht, Ben: 101

Hemingway, Anson Taylor
(uncle): 29,269

Hemingway, Dr. Clarence E.
(father): 28,62,64,69, 74

Hemingway, Ernest: birth, 1;
family, 3, 12, 14, 95, 226; writes
for Tabula, 10, 14, 16, 19, 21;
writes for Trapeze, 10, 14, 20,
23, 24, 26, 87; writes Class
Prophecy, 10; in high school
orchestra, 10; in high school

Class Play, 10; in high school
clubs, 10; gets job on Kansas
City Star, 29; meets Lionel
Moise, 38; attempts to enlist,
47-48; resigns from Star, 49;
in New York for embarkation
to Italy, 50; reviewed by Pres.
Wilson, 50; crosses Atlantic,
55; reaches Paris, 56; arrives in
Italy, June, 1918, 57; arrives in
Schio for ambulance duty, 58;
writes for Red Cross paper,
59-61; volunteers for Canteen
duty, 62; allowed to visit
trenches, 63; wounded, 60, 65-
66, 68, 71; hospitalized in Mi-
lan, 68; assigned to Italian in-
fantry, 69; decorated, 69; dis-
charged from Red Cross, 69;
sails for New York, 69; speaks
in Oak Park High School, 70;
goes to Horton Bay, Michigan,
72; expects to support himself
as fiction writer, 72; goes to
Toronto, 74; begins to write
for Toronto Star Weekly, 80;
first story for SW, 81; receives
first SW by-line, 82; final 1920
story for SW, 93; earnings in
1920, 94; writing fiction in
1920, 95; hired by Co-opera-
tive Commonwealth, 98; moves
to Chicago in 1920, 99; lives at
Y. K. Smith's apartment, 99;
story rejected by Vanity Fair,
101; sells to Double-Dealer,
101; meets Sherwood Ander-
son, 104; reads Anderson's
work, 105, 148; writes expose
of Co-operative Society of
America, 109; meets Hadley
Richardson, 109; resumes asso-
ciation with SW, 109; quits
Co-operative Society of Amer-
ica, 110; as columnist, 112-113;

INDEX

295

Hemingway, Ernest (cont'd)
tries to sell fiction to Argosy,
113; anxiety to return to Eu-
rope, 114; marriage, 114; re-
ceives Italian medals, 114-115;
hired as European correspond-
ent, 115; writes fiction in 1921,
116; sails for Paris with wife,
118; reaches Paris, 119; returns
to Paris from Switzerland, 123;
ordered to Genoa, 133; first
Genoa cable to Daily Star,
135; interviews Russian dele-
gation, 137; meets Max East-
man in Genoa, 138; meets Max
Beerbohm, 138; attends open-
ing session of Genoa Eco-
nomic Conference, 138-140;
leaves Genoa, 140; travels in
Europe, 145; meets Gertrude
Stein, 146; leaves Paris for
Black Forest walking trip, 159;
flies from Paris to Strasbourg,
July, 1922, 161; in Freiburg,
164; in Triberg, 164; returns
to Paris, 168; interviews Cle-
menceau, 168-169; sent to Con-
stantinople by Daily Star, 170;
arrives in Constantinople, 172;
final Near East dispatch, 184-
185; returns to Paris, 185;
works for International News
Service, 187; at Lausanne Con-
ference, November, 1922, 188;
meets William Bolitho, 190;
manuscripts stolen, 196; inter-
views Mussolini, 197; visits
Ezra Pound at Rapallo, 202;
ordered to Ruhr, 203; leaves
Germany, May, 1923, 223; goes
to Dolomites, 223; returns to
Paris, 223; publication, 224; re-
turns to Canada, 241; plans a
novel about Toronto, 242; first
story after return to Toronto,

251; transfers from DS to SW,
October, 1923, 251; uses pseu-
donym, 252-253; decides to re-
turn to Europe, 254; last ar-
ticle for SW, 254-255; in New
York for Lloyd George's ar-
rival, 255; resigns from To-
ronto Star, 256; leaves Toron-
to with wife and son for Eu-
rope, 257

High School Fiction
"Judgment of Manitou," 15-
17, 21; "A Matter of Colour,"
16-17; "Sepi Jingan," 17-18

High School Poetry
"Athletic Verse," 19-20; "How
Ballad Writing Affects Our
Seniors," 19; "The Inexpres-
sible," 19; "The Worker," 19

Poems

"Along with Youth," 227;
"Montparnasse," 227; "Okla-
homa," 227; "They All Want
Peace What is Peace?" 190,
194; Three Stories 6- Ten
Poems, 102, 158, 203, 223, 225,
226, 227, 285-286; "Ultimate-
ly," 101

Stories and Articles
"Big Two -Hearted River,"
141, 158, 273; "God Rest You
Merry Gentlemen," 49; "An
Alpine Idyll," 167; "The Kill-
ers," 41, 94; "L'Envoi," 240;
"Malady of Power," 266; "Mr.
and Mrs. Eliot," 154, 261;
"Monologue to the Maestro,"
266; "My Old Man," 149, 196;
"A Natural History of the
Dead," 57; "Old Newsman
Writes," 266; "On the Quai at

296

INDEX

Hemingway, Ernest (cont'd)
Smyrna," 186, 280; "A Pursuit
Race," 49; "The Revolution-
ist," 43, 215; "Soldier's Home,"
71, 151, 158; "The Snows of
Kilimanjaro," 180, 181, 186;
"Up in Michigan," 73, 149,
152-154, 196; "A Very Short
Story," 43

Fables

"A Divine Gesture," 101; "The
Faithful Bull," 275; "The Good
Lion," 275

Novels and Short Story Collec-
tions

Death in the Afternoon, 186,
228, 266; A Farewell to Arms,
48, 64, 66, 145, 182; For Whom
the Bell Tolls, 128; To Have
and Have Not, 166; in our
time, 45, 46, 223, 225-227, 229-
230, 235, 248; In Our Time,
73, 145, 149, 186, 225, 228, 234,
235, 236, 239, 241; The Sun
Also Rises, 125, 131, 141, 145,
213, 225, 258, 261; The Son-in-
Laiv (unwritten), 242; The
Torrents of Spring, 105, 148,
225, 261, 268

Art, attitude toward, 102;
characterization in journalism,
123-124, 177-178; comments on
writing, 104, 132, 155-156, 167,
179, 225, 228, 232, 242; dia-
logue in journalism, 93, 127-
128, 132-133, 181, 202, 213-214,
216, 218, 220, 255, 258, 260;
distaste for journalism, 101,
126, 143, 145, 159, 169, 188,
191, 219, 222-223, 232, 253,
261-262; expresses "Canadian
point of view," 123, 124, 126,

129, 135, 137, 139, 166, 173,
175, 200-201; hack work, ten-
dency toward, 87, 90, 113-114,
126, 128, 143, 160, 163, 165-
166, 240, 251-252, 261; humor
in journalism, 81-82, 86, 90,
101, 111-113, 115, 217, 255,
259-260; importance of jour-
nalism, 31-32, 34-35, 38, 39, 49,

59, 81, 92, 94, 142-143, 151,
159-160, 161, 174, 179, 231,
236, 239, 258; narrative in jour-
nalism, 257; observe politics,
diplomacy, 134, 174, 190; sat-
ire on Paris artists and expatri-
ates, 123-125, 130; sports, 7,
11, 16, 19-20, 61, 87-89, 94-95,
102-104, 110, 122, 141, 151,
170, 196, 229, 251-252, 261;
World War I, attitude to-
ward, 50, 55, 57-58, 61, 64, 66-
69, 72-73, 83-85, 102, 137, 168,
170-171, 173, 180-182, 229, 262

Hemingway, Hadley Richard-
son (wife): 109, 117, 118, 147,
159, 196, 223, 243, 255, 258, 262

Hemingway, Marcelline (sister):
23

"Hemingway's Early Days": 272

"Hemingway Slept Here": 272

Hemingway: The Writer as
Artist: 266

Henry IV: 67

Henry, O. (W. S. Porter): 16

Her Privates We: 27 1

Hickok, Guy: 149, 171, 196

Hicks, Wilson: 36, 49

Hindmarsh, Harry C.: 242, 244,
245, 246, 248, 250, 251, 255,
256, 257, 286

Home, William D., Jr.: 51, 54,

60, 73, 95, 99, 100, 104, 106,
109, 226

Hopkins, Charlie: 47, 49

INDEX

297

Horton Bay, Michigan: 15, 17,
26-27, 28, 49, 50, 61, 72, 73, 74,
89,95,98,113, 147, 196, 197

Hotchkiss School, The: 51

Hotel Jacob (Paris): 119

Hollywood: 29, 38, 245

Hunting: 252

I

Illinois, University of: 26, 38, 53
Ink on My Fingers: 272
Institute of Pacific Affairs: 121
Insull, Samuel: 96
International News Service: 148,

171, 187, 189, 190
"In the Wake of the News": 22.

See Lardner, Ring.
Ireland: 175
Ismet Pasha: 199
Italy: 48, 53, 57, 58, 135, 137,

142, 145, 159, 168, 180, 228
Ivanhoe: 5

j

Jackson County Jail (Kansas
City, Mo.): 46

James, Edwin: 138

James, Henry: 52, 57

Jardin des Plantes: 133

John Bull: 200

Johnson, Major: 181, 182

Johnson, Owen: 112

Johnston, T. W.: 30

Journalism, EH begins career in,
20; EH plans to major in it at
University of Illinois; impor-
tance to EH, 94, 160, 179, 231;
EH's attitude toward, 101, 161,
179, 191, 219, 232; cabelese,
186-187, 236; French press,
208-209

Joyce, James: 146, 244

K

Kansas City (Mo.): 28, 29, 58,
62, 64, 71, 75, 95, 192, 198, 228,
239, 241, 263

Kansas City Journal: 40

Kansas City Star: 29, 30, 34-36,
38, 43, 46-47, 50, 56-57, 59, 70,
75-77, 161, 249, 273; exchange
dept., 37-38; former reporters,
29, 30, 40, 48; morning edition,
47, 49; New York World,
compared to, 29; salaries, 46;
style sheet, 30-33; training
school, 29-30, 32, 36-39, 42-45,
49,59,75, 127, 151,258

Kansas City Times: 47, 49

Karlsruhe: 211

Kehl: 162, 163, 165, 216, 218

Kemal, Mustapha: 172, 173, 175,
176, 177, 187

Kerensky, Alexander: 240

Kilbane, Johnny: 213

Kilimanjaro, Mt.: 180

Kipling, Rudyard: 19, 41, 131,
178

Knight, Clifford: 37

V Action Frangaise: 208, 209

Laird, Landon: 34

Lake Geneva: 141

Lake Van: 180

Landis, Judge Kenesaw M.: 98

Lardner, Ring: 22-26, 59, 62, 79

Latin Quarter: 248. See Dome,

Paris, Rotonde
Lausanne: 129, 179, 187, 188, 205,

231

Leacock, Stephen: 79
Lenin, Nikolai: 136, 201
Les Avants, Switzerland: 122,

129

298

INDEX

Letters of Sherwood Anderson:

276

Lewis, Janet: 4, 267
Liberator, The: 138
Lippmann, Walter: 193
Little Magazines: 144
Little Review: 145, 146, 190,

229, 230, 233, 234, 235, 236,

238, 253
Lloyd George, David: 134, 138,

170, 222, 255, 258-259, 289
Loper, Richard: 106
London (England): 52, 120, 200
London Daily Herald: 138, 202
London Daily Mail: 195
London, Jack: 15
Longan, George: 46
Lowry, Mary: 248, 249, 253, 257,

262, 286
Luzon: 64

M

McAlmon, Robert: 125, 158,

203, 226

McDaniel, Marion R.: 24
MacLeish, Archibald: 200, 224
McNaught, Carlton: 121
Macedonia: 67, 139, 185. See

Greco-Turk War.
Macmillan Company, The: 52
Madeleine: 56
Madamoiselle from Armentieres:

50

Madrid: 239. See Spain.
Mailer, Norman: 64
Mainz: 217, 219
Making of Americans, The: 152,

153

Manchester Guardian: 192
Manning, Frederic: 66, 271
Maran, Rene: 132
Maritza River: 183, 229
Marmora, Sea of: 173

Masefield, John: 53, 254
Mason, Frank: 148, 149, 150, 171,

187, 278
Massey Hall (Toronto): 86, 139,

245

Men Like Gods: 259
Mesopotamia: 175
Milan: 57, 58, 60, 67, 68, 72, 142,

238. See American Red Cross

Hospital, Milan.
Middle Parts of Fortune, The:

66, 271
Middle West: 41. See Chicago,

Kansas City (Mo.); Oak Park

(111.)-

Milwaukee Journal: 41
Mr. and Mrs. Haddocks: 260
Moise, Lionel C.: 192, 193, 269-
270, 273; EH's estimate of, 39;
influence on EH, 38-40; liter-
ary principles, 39-42, 92
Monroe, Harriet: 203
Montmarte: 208. See Paris.
Mons: 171
Montreux, 130
Moorhead, William: 46
Morgan-Harjes Ambulance Sec-
tion: 53. See American Field
Service, American Red Cross
(Ambulance Corps).
Mowrer, Paul Scott, Mrs.: See
Hemingway, Hadley Richard-
son.

Mudanya: 173, 190
Muradii: 180
Muscle Shoals: 113
Musselman, Morris: 11, 25
Mussolini, Benito: 142, 197, 199,
211, 222

N

N.A.A.F.I.: 63

Naked and the Dead, The: 64
Napoleon: 200, 201

INDEX

299

Nation, The: 96, 98, 189
National Society of Fruitvalers:

96
Nelson, William Rockhill: 29,

30, 31, 37

New England: 3, 184
New Orleans: 101
New York: 171, 198, 255, 261
New York Herald Tribune: 250
New York Journal- American:

249

New York Sun: 70
New York Times: 138, 193
New York Tribune: 138
New York World: 29, 193
Nobel Prize: 253
Norton, Richard: 52, 53, 57
Northwestern University: 98
Noyes, Alfred: 254

Oak Park (111.): 8, 47, 70, 72,
81, 95, 184, 198, 204, 241, 243,
248; attitude toward EH, 1, 2,

24, 70; descr., 2-3; effect on
EH, 1, 125; Hemingway
home, 7; local morality, 7, 8,
24; prohibition, 3; religion, 4;
school system (See Oak Park
High School); social life, 4

Oak Park (111.) High School:
37, 59, 64, 71; academic stand-
ards, 4; athletics, 6, 7, 20, 22;
Class Book, 11, 14; classmates'
attitude toward EH, 16, 21,

25, 26, 70; Commencement,
1917, 10; faculty attitude to-
ward EH, 14, 24; teaching sal-
aries, 4

Oak Park (111.) High School,
English Dept.: 5, 9, 10, 16, 17,
19; ban on popular novels, 5;
classics, 5; academic standards,

15-16; composition, 19; fresh-
man texts, 5; faculty, 8; out-
side reading, 5; public speak-
ing, 5, 6; survey of American
literature, 5

Oberlin College: 29

Oberprecthal-in-the-Black For-
est: 165

Offenburg: 211, 213, 215, 216,
217, 219

Orient: 204

Ormiston, Tod: 40

Ouchy: 189, 197

Palazzo di San Giorgio (Genoa):
139

Pamplona: 251

Paris: 54, 56, 58, 116, 117, 118,
126, 138, 144, 146, 148, 159,
171, 174, 183, 203, 211, 212,
223, 224, 236, 247, 248, 257,
260, 268; EH and wife reach in
1922, 119; EH comments on,
210; in EH's journalism, 130-
134, 142; importance to EH,
117; EH satirizes expatriates,
130-132

Paris Was Our Mistress: 267

Parker, Harrison: 95-97, 109,
274-275

Parker, Harrison, Mrs.: 96

Parliament: 200

Pennsylvania State College: 53

Perkins, Maxwell: 28, 66

Petoskey, Michigan. See Horton
Bay, Michigan.

Piave River: 55, 62, 65

Pilgrim's Progress: 249

Pine Lake. See Horton Bay,
Michigan.

Platt, Frank J.: 2, 6, 7, 14, 21, 71

Pound, Ezra: 103, 122, 146, 157,
202, 225, 227, 242, 244, 254

300 INDEX

Poetry: 145, 253
Poincare, Jules: 208
Price, G. Ward: 195
Princeton University: 51, 53
Prizefighting: See Boxing.
Putnam, Samuel: 267
Put Out More Flags: 54

Quebec: 126

Rakovsky, Christian Georgye-

vich: 198

Rapallo: 137, 140, 202, 222
Reid, Emerson B. (Tim): 80
Report of the Department of

Military Affairs (Italy): 54,63
Rhine River: 162, 167, 213
Riley, James Whitcomb: 19
Rochdale Co-operatives: 99
Rodosto: 184
Rogers: David: 120, 121
Rome: 58, 126
Roosevelt, Theodore: 8
Rotonde: 119, 124, 125, 144
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: 112
The Ruhr: 160, 249
Russia: 134, 135, 198

St. Bernard Pass: 142

St. John Ambulance: 53

St. John, Robert: 267

St. Louis (Mo.): 109

Saint-Remy: 146

Saint-Simon, de, Comte: 40

Sandburg, Carl: 19

Sandhurst: 238

Saturday Evening Post: 39, 60,

62, 248
Schio (Italy): 58,61

Scott, Sir Walter: 5

Scribner's: 235

Selby, John: 35, 38

Senior Tabula: 268

Shakespeare, William: 6, 113

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley: 10

Siki, Battling: 170

Silvretta Range: 167

Simmons, Zalmon, Jr.: 51

Skiing: 196, 252, 254

Slocombe, George: 138, 188, 202

Smith, William B.: 114

Smith, Y. K.: 99, 100, 108, 113,
275; atmosphere at Smith
home, 100, 107, 108; comments
on relationship between EH
and Sherwood Anderson, 104;
memory of EH in 1920-21,
101

Smith, Y. K., Mrs.: 99

Smith, Kate: 99, 109, 114

Smyrna: 170, 172, 186

Sofia: 184

Spain: 145, 157, 204, 228; Hem-
ingways land in Vigo, 118; in
EH's journalism, 128

Spiegel, Frederick W., Jr.: 61,
62

Stamboul: 177

Stanford University: 53

Star Weekly. See Toronto Star
Weekly.

Stearns, Harold: 118

Steffens, Lincoln: 186, 195, 202,
231

Stein, Gertrude: 103, 150, 158,
178, 179, 194, 203, 204, 225,
226, 236, 242, 244, 260, 266; ad-
vises EH to quit journalism,
158-159; EH comments on his
debt to her, 145, 156; influence
on EH, 147, 150, 153-160, 179,
191, 212; The Making of
Americans, 152, 153; meets
EH, 146; Three Lives, 152

INDEX

301

Stewart, Donald Ogden: 260
The Story of the American Red
Cross in Italy: 271
Stout, Wesley W.: 39
Strasbourg: 161, 211, 212
Strater, Henry: 202, 238
Switzerland: 122-123, 129, 141,
145, 188

Tabula, The: 6, 10, 16, 17, 19,

267

Talleyrand: 201

Tchitcherin, George: 137, 138,
140, 189, 196, 198, 200, 202,
222

Thayer, Scofield: 146
This Was My World: 267
Thrace: 67, 230. See Greco-
Turk War.
Three Lives: 152
Three Mountains Press: 203
Time Magazine: 207
Toklas, Alice B.: 146, 226
Topeka (Kan.) Capitol: 31
Toronto: 27, 95, 109, 116, 119
133, 137, 146, 147, 148, 159,
173, 196, 204, 205, 220, 226,
239, 241, 249; EH's attitude
toward, 242; EH and bride ar-
rive in, 115; literary renais-
sance, 79, 82

Toronto Newspaper Guild: 256
Toronto Daily Star: 75, 80, 81,
116, 135, 137, 159, 163, 165,
169, 171, 172, 184, 187, 188,
196, 200, 205, 207, 211, 222,
237, 242; importance to EH;
professional standards, 77
Toronto Star: 78, 116, 222, 226,
244, 250; desc. by J. H. Cran-
ston; hires EH as European
correspondent, 115; profes-

sional standards, 76-77; im-
portance to EH, 75; require-
ments for foreign correspond-
ents, 119-121. See Toronto
Daily Star, The Toronto Star
Limited, Toronto Star Week-
ly.

The Toronto Star Limited: 75,
245, 287

Toronto Star Weekly. 75, 77,
81, 84-85, 109, 115-116, 123,
125-127, 135, 142, 158-159, 205,
209, 222, 239, 243, 258; con-
tributes to Can. literary ren-
aissance, 79; desc., 76-79; in-
fluence on EH, 107; need for
young writers, 79; profession-
al standards, 77-79; publishes
EH for first time, 81; use of
comic strips, 76

Toronto, University of: 246, 248

Trapeze, The: 11, 20-23, 25, 26,
59, 87, 217, 267; EH writes for
as high school junior, 21

Triberg: 164

Turkey: 170, 199. See Greco-
Turk War.

Twain, Mark: 41

Tzara, Tristan: 186

U

Ulysses: 146

United Station (Kansas City,

Mo.): 35
Universal News Service: 187-

190, 196

Vandercook, Dorothy: 272
Vanity Fair: 107, 261
Verdun: 53
Versailles: 172

302

INDEX

Vicenzia (Italy): 58
Vigo (Spain): EH and wife
land there, dispatch about, 121
Voltaire: 112

W

Wagenknecht, Edward: 7, 13
Wales, Henry: 188
Walsh, Ernest: 253
Waugh, Evelyn: 54
Wellington, C. G. (Pete): 31-

34, 36, 40, 42-43, 45-46, 77, 151,

192, 250; influence on EH, 76
Wells, H. G.: 5, 259
"When Hemingway Earned

Half a Cent a Word on the

Toronto Star": 272
Williams, William Carlos: 226
Wilcoxen, Fred: 19, 20, 25
Willcox, Edward: 10
Wilson, Edmund: 149-150, 152,

191, 224, 226, 241
Wilson, Woodrow: 8, 50, 52, 59
Winesburg, Ohio: 147, 149

Winters, Janet Lewis: See Lewis,
Janet.

Wirth, Joseph: 140

"With Hemingway Before A
Farewell to Arms": 266

Wittal, Captain: 181-182

Woollcott, Alexander: 193

Woon, Basil: 143

World War I: 8, 27, 28, 47, 52,
79. See Italy.

Wornall, Shorty: 237-238

Wright, Donald M.: 99, 100, 101,
103, 108, 132, 275; admiration
for Sherwood Anderson, 100,
103; attitude toward EH, 100,
106; diagnoses relationships
between EH and Sherwood
Anderson, 106; "A Mid-West-
ern Ad Man Remembers,"
101, 108; publishes sketch of
Y. K. Smith group, 101

Wright, Harold Bell: 112

Yale University: 54, 271
Yeats, William Butler: 253, 288