Hidden Hemingway , livre ebook

Hidden Hemingway
 

Ernest Miller Hemingway, age 13, Spring 1913, Oak Park, Illinois

Ernest Hemingway in field wearing uniform and pointing gun, undated, but circa 1918.
Hidden Hemingway
Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park
Robert K. Elder, Aaron Vetch, and Mark Cirino
The Kent State University Press Kent, Ohio
Copyright © 2016 by The Kent State University Press, Kent,
Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2015036095
ISBN 978-1-60635-273-1
Manufactured in Korea
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Elder, Robert K., author. | Vetch, Aaron, author. | Cirino, Mark, 1971- author.
Title: Hidden Hemingway : inside the Ernest Hemingway archives of Oak Park / Robert K. Elder, Aaron Vetch, and Mark Cirino.
Description: Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015036095 | ISBN 9781606352731 (hardcover : alk. paper) ∞
Subjects: LCSH: Hemingway, Ernest, 1899–1961. | Authors, American--20th century--Biography. | Oak Park (Ill.)-- Biography.
Classification: LCC PS3515.E37 Z5859 2016 | DDC 813/.52--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036095
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Contents
Finding Hemingway: A Preface by Robert K. Elder
Introduction by John W. Berry, Chairman of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park
Hemingway Timeline
Hemingway’s Oak Park: A Guide
Hemingway Family Tree
Inside the Archives
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Contributors
Illustration Credits
Finding Hemingway: A Preface
Robert K. Elder
Hidden Hemingway started as a newspaper article—or, more accurately, as a special issue of Oak Leaves , the longtime chronicle of news in Oak Park, which Ernest Hemingway delivered as a teen.
In 2014, I was the editor in chief of a newspaper chain that included Oak Leaves . I wanted to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I and write about Hemingway, the village’s most famous casualty of that war. I had moved to Oak Park from Chicago with my family in 2007, had heard all the Hemingway stories, and had visited the museum and his birthplace, both on Oak Park Avenue.
The special issue of Oak Leaves also gave me the opportunity to explore the Hemingway legacy and debunk the “wide lawns” myth: Hemingway never said or wrote that his hometown was a place of “wide lawns and narrow minds.”
In addition, it gave me the chance to spend time with Barbara Ballinger, a legendary local librarian and longtime board member of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, whose collection was housed in the third floor of the Oak Park Public Library. Over a couple of afternoons, we sifted through Hemingway’s family photos and teen notebooks, read the “Dear John” letter from his World War I love, Agnes von Kurowsky, and even examined a dental X-ray.
When the Oak Leaves special issue came out that July, the foundation hosted a series of events celebrating the author’s 115th birthday and the release of a second volume of his letters by Cambridge University Press. Penn State University’s Sandra Spanier, the editor of the series, spoke to a capacity crowd about Hemingway’s letters, his almost pathological love of correspondence, and his pack-rat tendencies. “Hemingway,” she told us, “saved every scrap of paper he ever touched.”
Had I not already gone through the Hemingway archives in Oak Park, I would have thought this a hyperbolic statement, but if anything, Spanier was downplaying the amount of material saved not only by Hemingway, but by his siblings and parents as well. Since starting this book, my collaborators and I have debated—lightheartedly—if it was sentimentality or a hoarding instinct that led the Hemingways to document their family history so meticulously: to save news clippings, birthday cards, lists, sheet music, and childhood books.
Clarence “Ed” Hemingway always encouraged his children to keep account books, and Grace compiled voluminous scrapbooks, so it’s easy to trace the instinct. Their children—especially Ernest and his sister Marcelline—were constantly adding to an empire of letters, photographs, receipts, and trinkets that seem to carry memories stronger than any blessing or curse.
That July, I approached John W. Berry, the chairman of the Oak Park foundation. It was a hot day during the Running of the Bulls events—part of the foundation’s yearly Hemingway celebrations—at which my six-year-old twins, and hordes of children like them, ran around the park in boxes decorated to look like bulls. I asked John if he had ever been approached about allowing a book to be done on the archives. He hadn’t. And it was too hot outside to discuss the idea. John was wearing a red scarf around his neck, handing out balloons and plastic bull key rings to kids. He needed time to think about it.
Within a few weeks, however, it was announced that the Hemingway Society had chosen Oak Park to host its seventeenth biennial International Hemingway Conference. A book celebrating Oak Park, the collection, and the village’s most famous author seemed like serendipity.
For Hemingway the writer, of course, all the material he saved was not only biography but also research. He was gathering data and details that made the life lived in his books more real, tangible.
We have endeavored to do the same in this book, to tell a life story through objects, ephemera, and photos that will illuminate Hemingway’s history. Some of what we found contradicts the public image he built for himself; some of it supports his larger-than-life myth. We hope that, in total, the book and the material we drew on makes Hemingway more human and also provides scholarly insight into his work.
The items in this volume are more than stage dressing for a literary life, more than marginalia. They provide definition, and in some cases, documentation of Hemingway’s ambition and heartbreak, literary triumphs and trials, joys and tragedies. It is Hemingway’s stature as a Pulitzer– and Nobel Prize–winning author that has drawn so many biographers and historians to his work. But it is also the wealth of material that he left behind that makes him such a compelling, engaging, and often infuriating research subject.
Lastly, a note on the word archive s, as used in the title of this book. It is very much intended to mean “archives” in the plural. The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park is the steward of the largest collection in the author’s hometown, which is itself comprised of many different collections, most notably the family archive of Marcelline Hemingway Sanford and items from private collectors such as Waring Jones (1927–2008). The Oak Park and River Forest Historical Society and the Oak Park Public Library are also treasure troves of Hemingway material, some of which we share in this volume.
For years, Hemingway scholars such as Carlos Baker, Jeffrey Meyers, Michael Reynolds, and Paul Hendrickson have used these hometown archives for their deeply researched biographies. Even Michael Palin, a Monty Python alum, visited the archives for his TV series (and eventual book), Michael Palin’s Hemingway Adventure . As researchers ourselves, we’re indebted to all those who have chronicled Hemingway’s life and work in such detail.
Now, for the first time, my coauthors and I are offering the same intimate experiences we had with the Hemingway collections to the public—without the searching through boxes and wading through folders. Not that this is a complete document of the treasures to be found in Oak Park. Not by a long shot. There’s still more to be catalogued, more to be found. We hope this book serves as a primer for all future Hemingway admirers and scholars who hope to meet the author in his hometown through the archives he left behind.
For more infromation, visit www.hiddenhemingway.com , on Twitter: @hiddenhemingway, or on Instagram: @hiddenhemingway.
Introduction
John W. Berry, Chairman of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park
Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park shares treasures from Ernest Hemingway kept in the archives of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park and the Oak Park Public Library, most published here for the first time.
Hemingway remains among the most influential writers of the twentieth century, and his work continues to be relevant in the twenty-first century as well. The directness and poetic simplicity of his prose helped shape and transform both American and European modernism. Generations of nonnative English language speakers learned to read and write the language by reading him—and were captivated by the richly human stories he told, stories that still resonate today.
Robert K. Elder, Aaron Vetch, and Mark Cirino have culled the Oak Park archives for unique items that tell the story of Ernest Hemingway’s formative years and beyond.
The book supports the core mission of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park: to foster “understanding of the life and work of Ernest Hemingway with emphasis on his Oak Park origins and his impact on world literature.” This mission also reflects the foundation’s belief in “the importance of the written word and the value of thoughtful reading and writing.”
Since its founding in 1983, one of the primary goals of the foundation has been to establish and promote educational programs and outreach efforts that focus on the influence Hemingway’s years in Oak Park had on his intellectual, cultural, and spiritual values, as found in his writing and exhibited in his personal life.
The collection of materials from the Oak Park archives supports this central educational mission and supplements a larger collection of digitized materials made available on the Internet through a grant to the Oak Park Public Library by the Illinois State Library, as part of the Illinois Digital Library Initiative Project.
The process of findin