Ernest Hemingway: The Young Years

by CHARLES A. FENTON

ERNEST HEMINGWAY has always been acutely aware of Oak Park, Illinois, where he was born in 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 conditioned 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 boundaries, he still thought of Oak Park with creative regret. “I had a wonderful novel to write about Oak Park,”Hemingway said in 1952, “and would never do it because I did not want to hurt living people.”

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. “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.” Some of his classmates share the pious bewilderment of that older group. “It is a puzzle,” one of them 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 preWorld 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. 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.”

One’s neighbors were scrutinized with New England severity. If one happened to be, like Ernest Hemingway, the oldest son of a union between two such locally prominent families as the Hemingways and the Halls, the scrutiny was 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 a world far more homogeneous, socially and economically, 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. Some fathers were clearly more successful 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 near-by Cicero were an unknown 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.

Copyright 1952, by Charles A. Fenton.

2

IN SUCH a community, education was as important as religion, and equally earnest. Like most Midwesterners of their class and period, Oak Parkers had a real hostility toward the eastern private schools to which many of them might well have sent their children. They therefore established 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 ot Williams, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Yale, Amherst, or the fashionable and more regionally attractive Beloit. Oak Park candidates dominated the competitive exams for the ten scholarships the University of Chicago awarded annually to area students. Teaching 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. 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. Two of the supplementary texts were Rhodes’s 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 — H. G. Wells, for example, and Owen Wister— but the popular novels of the era were virtually outlawed. The required reading becomes less lugubrious in terms of Hemingway’s mature work when we recall that he subsequently said, “That’s how I learned to writeby reading the Bible,” adding that by the Bible he meant partieularly the Old Tostament.

It was after freshman year, however, that Hemingway worked under what he himself cited as his significant teachers. “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.”The principal teaching assignments of Miss Biggs and Miss Dixon were in the upperclass courses that stressed composition and public speaking.

“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 of the old home, 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, 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 ambition nor choice. At Oak Park if you could play football you had to play it.” Miss I Dixon and Miss Biggs relieved some of the frust ration.

Margaret Dixon expressed in her classes the vigor and conviction of an articulate, positive woman. A classmate of Hemingway, who later became a teacher himself, remembered her with clarity. Edward Wagenknecht studied under her for two successive years, and “knew her very well.” She was a “ very frank, straight forward, honest, down-to-earth person,” said Wagenknocht in 1951, “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 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 heart! her describe 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 altering the past to fit the achievement of Hemingway’s maturity. 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, urged us to use our imagination and dare to try putting into writing our original and interesting thoughts.” Miss Dixon was a blunt erilir. “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 stern honesty and mild iconoclasm were valuable antidotes to the smug complacence of Oak Park. “Her economic and social ideas, one of her personal friends recalled, “were somewhat at variance with the very conservative school and community. American high schools have been blessed with many Miss Dixons; she was not professionally unique, nor was her relationship with Hemingway unusual.

Fannie Biggs, the other English teacher whom Hemingway described as “very nice and especially nice to me,” was the ideal complement for Miss Dixon. “She was a kind of genius,” according to ihe chairman of the English Department, a frail but. wiry little woman, with a well-read mind, with exacting requirements, and with a fine sense of humor.” A colleague compared the two women; “Miss Dixon’s work was a clarification in whatever the assignment might be. Miss Biggs, out of much more temperamental disposition, would flourish more in the field of imagination.”

Miss Biggs’s interest in Hemingway was somewhat more personal than Miss Dixons. She responded not only to his potential as a student, but to bis problems as an individual. She observed ids difficulties, most of them common to all adolescent boys, a few of them peculiar to Ids particular position, and did wha1 she could, in the most tentative way, to soften them. Hemingway was at ease with her, in a wax that was neither odd nor excessive. Occasionally 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 newspapci wotk completed, it was to Fannie Biggs that Hemingway boasted mildly about his journalistic triumphs, just before he left Oak Park in May, 1018, for the war in Italy.

3

IT WOULD be a distortion, however, to conceive of Hemingway as a predominantly bookish or literary high school student. In the accumulation of extrncurricular 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 be 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 magazines. In bis last two years he belonged to a trio of debating and selfimprovement groups. The 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 o fie red its members a series of addresses “on efficiency, Christ innity and such things that are desirable to the life of a hoy. Hemingway was in the Athletic Association as a freshman, sophomore, and senior. He played junior varsity football in his second and third years, and 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 bis first three years 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 conceived 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 hast ily 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 interest and acceptance, and for several weeks, according to the late Morn’s 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 ow ned or fired such a weapon, and posed them professionally.

The anecdote restores the proper perspective to any conception of Hemingway as a mere victim ol a highly organized school hierarchy. He was as vigorously competitive in Oak Park as he has been in his manhood. “Listen, he told a young writer in 1936. “There is no use writing anytlong 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.” Hemingway has seldom been able to resist a challenge in any area of his life, but he has rarely solemnized his competitive 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, of course, that this buoyancy should disguise a more somber aspect of his life and attitudes. Hemingway as an adult has never taken anything easily, nor do many high school students of intelligence and sensitivity have an entirely carefree existence. His was no exception. 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, however — sufficiently brief so that he never dropped back in school because of them — were little more than the rebellious independence of a restless boy. Years later Hemingway declared that the best training for a writer was an unhappy boyhood. This was in part a serious 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 belitllement of artistic solemnity. To think of his adolescence in terms of misery or maladjustment is to misunderstand his Oak Park experience and his personality.

It is true that his adolescence was made difficult by the intensity of bis own character and the complexity of his family relationships. Normally his buoyancy and energy sustained him; occasionally he had bleak moments. The emotional variety 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 another classmate, “but I never saw anything to confirm any of this.” he could hardly have acquired those eight, lines devoted to him in the Class Book had his four years been consistently chaotic or disturbed. The epitaph beneath his extracurricular record summed up the wry, impressed assessment of his contemporaries. “None,”they concluded, “are to be found more clever than Ernie.”

4

THE eleverness which his Oak Park classmates discovered in Hemingway went beyond the casual wit and horseplay of high school friendships. It 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 magazine; his work in the Tabula reaffirms those qualities which caused his classmates to greet with eagerness the themes he read in the English courses. He never held office on the Tabula, and, indeed, the aggressiveness which he brought to the more conventionally masculine activities was conspicuously absent or concealed in his early attitude toward both the magazine and the newspaper, He did not compete for the Tabula as he competed for other extraeurrieulnr a wards. There was a reticence in bis 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 temperament. 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 magazine while I was on it,” said a classmate whose editorial tenure on the Tabula covered their junior and 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 he printed whether it appealed to me or not.”

The story itself, published in the issue of February, 1916, is quite naturally without artistic validity save in the synthetic hindsight of Hemingway’s mature work. The dialogue, it is true, was clearly an attempt to reproduce authentic idioms, and the narrative was brisk and lucid. It is always noteworthy when a high school junior labors long enough to contrive a readable narrative. “Judgment of Manitou” was eminently readable. It marked the author as possessing an interest in the mechanics of storytelling. Its rich detail indicated that he enjoyed writing it. 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 mul 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 was a bloodthirsty story, clear and precise, tempered by irony, elaborate only in its relatively complicated plot. 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 newspaper. 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 newspaper career was thrust upon him in Oak Park in the winter of 1916, when he was sixteen.

Hemingway’s next work for the Tabula demonstrated 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. 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 prizelight world he was just then encountering through his boxing 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 light. The denouement was withheld until the final line; everything hinged upon the information of that last sentence. The treatment reflected the current debt to O. Henry.

The momentum of English III, out of which had come “Judgment of Manitou and “ A Matter of Colour,”sustained Hemingway’s instinct toward creative writing during his senior year. The first issue of the 1916-17 Tabula, published in November, featured another story drawn from the northern Michigan material. “Sepi Jingan" was also largely dialogue, a tale of violence and revenge told by an Ojibway Indian. This time, on the other hand, Hemingway avoided the artificiality of total monologue. There was a base of fragmentary exposition and tlu‘ narrator asked occasional questions that kept the Indian’s speech fluid.

The most promising characteristic of “Sepi Jingan,”however, was Hemingway s introduction of a statement. His conception of the two previous stories had never gone beyond the anecdotes themselves. Now he erented another dimension by inserting the paradox of an Ojibway 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 man hunt he was describing. ‘The statement was clumsily handled at times, and, understandably, Hemingway had not yet learned to make a thesis unobtrusive and implicit. The dialogue, 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 knowledgcability.

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 over 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-everything. 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 knowledgcability of his mature work. It was not always as adult as the poised estimate of Paul Black Bird’s misfortune. Occasionally Hemingway was content to mine only slapstick from this capacity for understanding. One of Miss Dixon’s annual assignments to her upperclassmen, for example, was the composition of a ballad. Hemingway’s precocious handling of this exercise was printed in that same November, 1916, issue of the Tabula. It was an ancient device whose entire forty-eight, lines consisted of variations on the author’s query as to what he should write about and how he should rhyme it. The whole lively jest, “How Ballad Writing Affects Our Seniors,”indicated an affection for Kipling and a confident charm. The first stanza stated the approach and content of the other five.

He also collaborated with his friend and teammate, Fred Wilcoxen, in some impressionistic, Sandburg-like free verse about a football game. Football for Hemingway had been largely an unavoidable chore. “Football,”he explained later, talking about t he experiences which had been helpful in learning to write, “I knew too much about and it did not intrest me really and I have never written a line about it. They had a very Spartan system, and the football field, when I first played (Phipps Field) was about three miles from school. You made that back and forth by foot and after it was too dark to see you ran plays with a whitened ball and the linemen pushed the bucking machine up and clown the field. Three guys lay down on the runway to the tackling dummy and you had to take off in front of them to dive and make the tackle. Afterwards they ran once around the mile track and jogged or walked home. You were always too tired to study: especially if they had been running plays through you until dark and you had to have good marks to play.”

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. His assignments were generally the varsity athletic contests; and it was to Arthur Bobbitt, the faculty adviser on the paper, that Hemingway owed 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 student hierarchy of editors, business staf, 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 Hemingway one day in study hall, had often spoken about his writing 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, and which required the intercession of Mr. Platt and Miss Dixon before “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 renew his arguments for the next issue, Hemingway, the adviser recalled, “soon became an enthusiastic reporter.”

He wrote twenty-four stories between November, 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 hundred words long. Although Hemingway was functioning as a reporter rather than a columnist, he couldn’t 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 missing pair due to parental objection to his swimming.”

Such editorialization would have been red-penciled by Mr. Bobbitt, who supervised the paper very closely. Bobbitt, 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. The latter soon grew restless under the drab bondage of sports writing, and on his own he launched what was by far the most significant enterprise, either journalistic or creative, of his high school writing.

5

IN 1917 Ring Lardner was probably the contemporary writer most widely read by the young men in the Chicago area. His column in the Chicago Tribune was one of the municipal glories, revered by subscribers of all kinds. Hemingway’s contemporaries testify to their own excitement when they first encountered 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 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. In a column of May 4, 1917, addressed to “DearMarce” — his sister Marcelline was editor that week — Hemingway demonstrated the authenticity of his adaptation.

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 peculiar that except in one family the sister is an awful lot better looking than the brother. But we are too modest to say which family is the exception. Huh? Marce?

Hemingway also understood the Lardner device of self-derision. “The Trapeze is short of stuff,” he wrote, a paragraph or two later, “and so don’t get sore if I string this out because anyway you should give me lots of space because 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. Bobbitt’s subsequent statement that Hemingway “took articles from the Chicago papers and studied them carefully.” The young satirist completed the sevenhundred-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. Gehlmann 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 John Gehlmann, this derision should have been directed not at him, but at the Superintendent, Mr. 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 said once, “that Ernie was writing like Ring Lardner— and consequently a lost soul! McDaniel remained unimpressed by Hemingway’s mature work.

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 HEMINOWAY,” it read, with an ironic subheading: “Ring Lardner Has Objected to the Use of His Name.” 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 material was written in the last weeks of his senior year. Hemingway bowed out of Oak Park in the role of professional iconoclasm.

“Mr. Dale Bumstead,” he wrote, “gives a dinner dance tomorrow night at the Country Club. Messrs. Morris Musselman, Fred Wilcoxen, Ernest Hemingway, Abraham Lincoln and General Joffre will not be among those present, all having perfect alibis.” Hemingway also returned to the locally prohibited topic of gambling. “Several members of the Trap Shooting Club,” he declared, “are exhibiting pieces of silver ware of the Ohlsen s home as trophies of the meeting 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 editor of these columns and announced their slogan as ‘Hemingway and a full Stein! Hemingway’s valediction was thus an amiable roundhouse swing at faculty, community, and classmates, not the less pointed for its amiability.

Hemingway’s work for the Trapeze provided him with a personal direction. Mr. 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. 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 sal with the other five editors and read and edited the work of the reporters.

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 Hemingway autographed a book for Lardner, at the latter’s request, inscribing it. “To Ring Lardner from his early imitator and always admirer, Ernest Hemingway. 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.

In June, 1917, however, the Trapeze and Lardner and writing as a whole were put aside lor 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 his free-lance work in Toronto in 1920. The summer of 1917, however, was a difficult one for any eighteenyear-old American as aggressive and restless as Hemingway. For such a boy the events in Europe marched their distracting shadows across the woods of Michigan.

6

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 boys too young,”Dr. Hemingway had said, and there the discussion ended — made his situation intolerable. He talked about getting 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.

In Kansas City lived Dr. Hemingway’s younger brother, Tyler Hemingway, a successful, socially prominent businessman. Tyler Hemingway could not only provide 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, chief editorial writer of the Kansas City Star and for some years its Washington correspondent. “I wanted to work on the Star,” Hemingway declared many years later, “because I thought it was the best paper in the

U.S.” Like the 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, provocative, 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 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, Wellington has been described by the playwright. Russel Crouse—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 discussed it with him, whether it was merely the phoned-in facts of a General Hospital stabbing, or a story written on his return to the city room. Wellington was particularly insistent on the observance of Rule Twenty-one: —

The atmospl ere of the Star was a fresh and exciting one, for which nothing in Hemingway’s high school journalism could have prepared him. “They worked us very hard,” Hemingway remembered thirty-five years later, “especially 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; it was what they expected to get from every young reporter lucky enough to work for the Star. They expected, too, that $60-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 developed by the man who made the Star, the legendary Colonel William Rockhill Nelson, and two of his first editors, T. W. Johnston and Alexander Butts. In its essentials it is a remarkable document. The style sheet’s first paragraph— and it remains the initial paragraph in the Current style book — might well stand as the First Commandment in the prose creed which is today synonymous with the surface characteristics of Hemingway’s work.

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 One 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.

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. 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. Hemingway — who worked there for only seven months — could recall in 1952 that “you were never to say a man was seriously injured. All injuries are serious. He was, as I recall, 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 vou were just as responsible for having learned it as after you ve had the articles of war read to vou.

If one worked even briefly in this world where short sentences and vigorous English were truly important things, then he woidd, fundamentally, write that way forever, just as he would always w rite with 1 he emphasis on freshness and originalit v.

They used to say that on the Star you could write a story backwards if you made it interesting enough. This becomes believable when Rule ‘Three of the sty le 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 enjoyable 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 authenticity, 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 cityeditor Pete Wellington. 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 disciplinarian, very just and very harsh,” Hemingway said once, “and I can never say properly how grateful I am to have worked under him.”

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

He 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?” American journalism was just emerging from a period of heavy, turgid prose. Like the Star Rules, Wellington’s careful, frugal use of adjectives, in which the fresh and evocative was always sought, was evidence 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. “ I ‘ve 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.

7

HEMINGWAY scrambled eagerly through this professional world, “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.”

“I covered the short-stop run,” Hemingway said later, “which included the 15th Street police station, the Union Station and the Genera I Hospital. He remembered the small details of his daily routine. “At the l5th 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 shndv characters i got to know, and interviews with celebrities going through.” The third area, of his heat was the one where he found most of his action. “The General Hospital was up a long hill from the Union Station and there you got accidents and a double cheek on crimes of violence. On another occasion, more than twenty years after he left the Star, even his senses could respond to a discussion 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.”

Wellington, who saw Hemingway at least briefly during almost every day ol his seven months on t he paper, remembered 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 till those on the stall 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 characterizing them in ways he couldn’t write in the paper.

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 Crouse recalled, “was secretly working on a novel.” Literary critics have sometimes patronized Hemingway as the victim of an abbreviated and inadequate education. On the contrary, in addition to the admirable instruction at Oak Park High, lie was the beneficiary of an extremely literate and concentrated training, general as well 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 University of Illinois. “The Star,” according to Clifford Knight, who grew up in its circulation area before he joined its stall, “was a cultural bath.” U served this function both for those who read it and for those who wrote it.

Hemingway belonged only occasionally to the group which discussed literature and art in reverent, almost academic terms. Instead, when the paper was put. to bed, he turned to a spokesman of a different approach to fiction. Lionel Calhoun Moise became a legend in American city rooms by the time he was thirty. During the rest of his life the legend extended in depth of anecdote without changing its essential pattern. Witnesses to Moise’s career arc invariably 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 bad read a thousand perishable accounts of the day’s events, always remembered one or two by Mbise 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 oi 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 copslugger and barroom brawler, a Front Page character who, in Russel Crouse 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 remembered him in 1952, the year of his death, as “a very picturesque, dynamic, big-hearted, harddrinking and hard-fighting man,” adding that he had “always regretted that his talent was not disciplined and canalized into good writing.”

Moise, as Hemingway implied by that brief epitaph, was more than just a dissolute, professional he-man. “If Hemingway learned anything on the Star, according to Lesley Stout, a famous Kansas ity reporter who later became managing editor of the Saturday livening Post “it was from Moise, whose footsteps he dogged. Moise had many theories 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 indication of what he taught Hemingway, He was fond of pointing out that copyreaders hated to read his stories because 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 has to be shortened.”

He was, for all his romanticism and his saloon gregariousness, a sharply critical man, capable of expressing his beliefs in pungent epigram, “It is ;i 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 colleague to quit his job on the overstaffed Star and take one with the Kansas City Journal. “With its ridiculously small staff,” he explained, “the Journal will run you ragged 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. Kussel Crouse 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 newspapermen,” Wilson Hicks recalled, “men like Tod Ormiston 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 llie qualities which fiction must possess.

“Pure objective writing,” Moise often said, “is the only true form of story-telling.” 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 persuasive lecturer. “In short, no tricks,” Moise, unlike others to whom Hemingway was temporarily indebted, neither envied nor belittled the vou tiger mans success, “I have since heard Hemingway quoted,”Moise said in 1952, in one of the last let ters he wrote, ”to the effect that this and olher pronouncements influenced him for the good.” Moise’s ironic wit was still active. “Put,” 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 objectivity; dialogue, action, and a minimum of descript ion.”

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. Maryin Creager, his first city editor, remembered that even then Moise had “a flair for the intellectual and a thirst for knowledge.” Creager, who subsequently became editor of the Milwaukee Journal and made it one of the great Midwestern dailies, remembered too that Moise read widelyand “find erst and ingly.” He could concentrate 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 Hemingw ay — the one’s official and stern, the other’s friendly and com vivial — made the Star another profitable, step in the apprenticeship. 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; Hemingway, above all, was an apt and industrious pupil.

(To be continued)