At the height of his fame, Ernest Hemingway was a character who could not exist in our modern media world: a literary celebrity as well-known for his vigorous, masculine escapades as for his spare, masculine writing. He hunted lions in Africa. He attended bullfights in Spain. He fished for marlin off Key West. He married glamorous women (war correspondent Martha Gellhorn), then divorced them for others even more glamorous.
“He was larger than life,” my college English professor told our American Literature class during a lesson on For Whom the Bell Tolls. “There can never be anyone like him again, because literature doesn’t play the same role in American life as it did in his day.”
With a few exceptions, “famous novelist” is indeed an oxymoron today. In truth, Hemingway’s short stories were better than his novels, because they were better suited to his compressed style, which was based on his “Iceberg Theory”: “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about 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.”
It has been a hundred years since Hemingway published his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, issued in a private edition of 300 copies by a Paris publisher. The next year, the three stories — “Up in Michigan,” “Out of Season,” and “My Old Man” — appeared in In Our Time, the collection of modernist vignettes that provided the 25-year-old Hemingway his first taste of literary success.
To commemorate the centennial of Hemingway’s career, I visited the house where he grew up at 339 Oak Park Ave., in Oak Park, which is now the Ernest Hemingway’s Birthplace Museum, restored to commemorate his childhood. Just inside the front door, next to a shelf of paperback editions of Hemingway novels, are a Corona typewriter, similar to one owned by the famous author, and two racks of t-shirts, reading “Write drunk, edit sober” and “There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
Hemingway’s father, Clarence, was a doctor, and his mother, Grace, gave music lessons in the family parlor, so the Queen Anne house was filled with the accouterments of a late Victorian/early Edwardian bourgeois family: a piano in the parlor, nurseries for the children, a servant’s room, framed family photographs on the wall, a kitchen with a bellied, wood-burning stove. The family also owned a vacation home near Petoskey, Michigan, the state where some of Hemingways’s most famous short stories — “Up in Michigan,” “Big Two-Hearted River” — are set.
Hemingway has been dead for 62 years, but even so, he remains America’s preeminent literary lion, rivaled only by Mark Twain. He may no longer be the most-read American author — his writing, which was boldly modernist in its day, can now seem shallow — but he is still the best known, said Carla Mayer, the docent who gave me a solo tour of the house. Hemingway is to writing what Babe Ruth was to baseball: a figure who defines his endeavor, for all generations. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath has a much higher Amazon ranking than Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, but Steinbeck was not nearly as colorful a character.
“I think Hemingway is one of the few names you could drop in any continent, anyplace around the world, and they will know who it is,” Mayer told me. “It’s pretty hard not to hear the name Hemingway in a week, and some of that is because he was a pretty good media promoter himself.”
Like all cultured families, the Hemingways had a library, where Ernest was weaned on Dickens, Longfellow, Kipling’s Indian Tales, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware. It was a comfortable upbringing, but Hemingway was embarrassed by it — and his family was embarrassed of him.
“He was embarrassed of his privilege,” Mayer said. “I think he also thought that a rags-to-riches story would sell better. Hemingway never gives [his family] any credit for anything. That was one of his character flaws. He was never very good at acknowledging the helpers and the influences on his life.”
After Hemingway published In Our Time, his family was at first thrilled to hear he was making progress in his literary ambitions. But Hemingway’s work was a radical break with the literature in his family’s library, both in style and content. In one story, a soldier contracts venereal disease from a prostitute in a taxicab.
“They’re expecting Victorian novels,” Mayer said. “That’s not what they got. His father packs the books back up, he says, ‘I don’t want that filth in my house.’ Grace writes a letter and she says, ‘I know you got great reviews. But it’s a dubious honor to produce one of the filthiest books of the year. And if I had read a book by any other writer with such words in it, I would pitch it in the fire.’”
The stories of both Hemingway’s family and its most famous son ended cataclysmically. Dr. Clarence Hemingway committed suicide at the age of 57, shooting himself with his father’s Civil War revolver. Ever bitter toward his mother, Heminway claimed that she had “henpecked his father to suicide.” Ernest died the same way, with a rifle, at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, and was buried in the Ketchum Cemetery. Hemingway left Oak Park when he was 18, to serve as an ambulance driver in World War I, and rarely came back home, either personally or in his fiction. None of his stories are set in Oak Park. “Soldier’s Home,” which is obviously about his own return from the war, takes places elsewhere in the Midwest, in Kansas City. He is far more associated with Paris, Pamplona, and Key West. Hemingway was never comfortable acknowledging his suburban origins, but Oak Park was where he learned to write, and it’s where any serious reader of his fiction should begin learning his life story.