The Hidden Sexual Taboo in Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home,” Part 2

"A Moveable Read," from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, publishes a variety of analyses and points of view about Ernest Hemingway's life and works. Individual articles may not reflect the views and opinions of the Foundation.

By Christopher Morse

In the first part of this blog, [LINK] the author introduces the possibility that underage incestuousness lies below the surface of the soldier’s relationship with his younger sister. In part 2 the author explores this relationship and its implications in more detail.

In “Soldier’s Home,” the incestuous implications of what is said by the protagonist’s younger sister (Helen) are far from subtle, and they arouse discomfort if read too closely. Most reviewers have chosen to ignore those implications; they remark on Helen’s “sweetness,” her “innocence” and even “purity.” However, there is nothing innocent in what she is actually saying, only in her presumed obliviousness as she says it.  

Yet just how oblivious could she be? I’ll assume with you that she knows next to nothing about sex. But she is not a little tyke. Hemingway doesn’t give her age, but she’s old enough to play sports in a serious way, old enough to know about beaus and to know that she wants one. The girl must be aware, at least, that such relationships involve things like kissing and cuddling.

Even if Helen has no idea what her offer implies, the reader does. That so many reviewers protest the girl’s innocence is evidence that the incestuous, pedophilic undertones register at some level and make them uneasy. Krebs would not miss those undertones. Neither, of course, would Hemingway.

“Soldier’s Home” is crafted with the same deliberation and precision as “The Killers,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” or any of the author’s best. Every word is selected with care, and most phrases carry more than their superficial meaning. When Krebs’s mother sits down to speak with him she removes her glasses. That simple gesture is telling: she wants her son to see her clearly, but she is unwilling to see him. We are told in passing that Krebs’s father rents an office in the First National Bank building and parks his car out front. Doesn’t this suggest a status-conscious Babbitt, slyly maneuvering to be associated with the little town’s most prestigious institution? An author who takes care with such tiny details would not write a whole page of dialogue with no special purpose in mind. The exchange between Krebs and Helen represents hours of careful composition. It is inconceivable that Hemingway could have overlooked the sexual connotations. I believe he fully intended them to be there.  

During his early writing life, Hemingway penned what would have been classified as “dirty stories,” “Summer People” being a notable example. Gertrude Stein is said to have scolded the young author for writing what could not be published. But why was such material, featuring consensual sex between a man and a woman, unpublishable? It must have vexed Hemingway to labor for weeks to produce a deeply felt, elegantly crafted story, only to have it rejected on the basis of some editor’s prudery. We may imagine him taking pleasure, then, in publishing a story in which a child offers herself as a girlfriend to her adult brother. He realized that he could get away with it simply by broaching the taboo in plain sight; Helen flirts openly with Krebs at the breakfast table, their mother in the next room. The transgression is overt but filtered such that few readers circa 1925 would have allowed themselves to perceive it plainly.

Even a century later it’s hard to accept what is taking place right before us. But how else to explain this conversation? Why introduce a sister into this story at all? She is best understood as a coda to the theme of Krebs’s sexual unrest; Helen presents a possible answer to the protagonist’s main concern—which is otherwise left unresolved.

Let’s also notice how neatly she matches the specifications of the girl Krebs longs for: a friend, willing and available, uncomplicated, and requiring no courtship, no talking. It may be a plus that Helen is a tomboy, perhaps not unlike the plain girls whom Krebs dated in Germany. Pretty, popular girls, girls like Brett Ashley of The Sun Also Rises, are hard to get and grueling to maintain. They would only create more trauma for the unsteady Krebs, while plain girls and tomboys offer comfort.

How will Krebs respond to his sister’s naive prompt? He may not be fully aware of receiving it. Yet some new notion may lurk just below the surface of his mind. After the excruciating scene with his mother, Krebs elects to avoid a similar encounter with his father and retreats instead to watch Helen play baseball. Instinctively he is drawn to her as a haven from conflict, much as the girls he slept with in France and Germany provided a haven from the war. And, after all, hasn’t she indicated that coming to her game will demonstrate his love and win hers?     

It’s awful to think that he may pursue things further. Perhaps he’ll decide against it—because he just doesn’t want to, or out of concern for consequences, or for fear of harming his sister. Krebs is not malicious. But we can’t know for certain what he will do, for this young man is not operating in the ordinary world. “I’m not in God’s Kingdom,” he tells his mother. The ethical norms he once accepted without question no longer have much hold on him. Krebs went to war, got immersed in the chaos and the cruelty and the unrelenting sin of it. Sexual relations with his little sister lurk as a real possibility given the moral turmoil in which he lives.

About the Author

Christopher Morse is a freelance writer, actor, and rare book dealer, residing in the arts-oriented mountain community of Idyllwild, California. He is currently at work on a theatrical adaptation of several of Hemingway’s early short stories, tentatively entitled, Hemingway in Seven Acts.

The Hidden Sexual Taboo in Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” Part 1

By Christopher Morse

"A Moveable Read," from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, publishes a variety of analyses and points of view about Ernest Hemingway's life and works. Individual articles may not reflect the views and opinions of the Foundation.

Ernest Hemingway’s short fiction brims with both violence and sex. Due to the restrictions of his time, the sex is rarely graphic. Sexual matters are broached via hints, euphemisms, and half-finished sentences. In the story discussed in this essay, for example, we are told repeatedly that the main character “wants a girl”; we have to infer what he wants one for.

Still, sex is prominent throughout the Hemingway canon, and little of it is conventionally “lawful”—procreative and conducted within the confines of marriage. Much of it is casual and between near-strangers. Quite a lot is outside the standards of the era. Lesbianism (called “perversion”) is central to “The Sea Change.” Pederasty is the undertone of “A Simple Inquiry.” Brother-sister incest is alluded to in “The Battler.” There is underage coupling: a girl of twelve or so is the first love of the equally young Nick Adams.

To hint at incest and underage sex combined would be risqué even for Hemingway, but my analysis suggests that he did just that in his 1925 story, “Soldier’s Home.”

In the summer of 1919 Harold Krebs reluctantly returns home from war. Because he has served several months with the occupation in Germany following the Armistice, it is now too late for a hero’s welcome. Life has moved on in his Oklahoma town. People are unreceptive when he wants to speak of his war experiences, and eventually he gives up trying.

Although it may not show, Krebs most likely suffers from shell shock—what we would call post-traumatic stress disorder. He must handle it on his own. So far, at least in his view, he is doing well. His personal therapy consists of keeping everything calm and simple. Krebs does very little in the weeks following his return: he sleeps late, reads on the front porch, strolls about the town, frequents its cool, dim pool hall.

The one issue troubling him is girls. In what may seem an overwritten passage, taking up a full quarter of the text, Krebs gazes with yearning at the young women passing along the sidewalk. He vacillates, wanting them but seeing himself no part of their world, wanting them but feeling enervated at the thought of the courting, of the complex politics, of all the talking and lies required to get them. It isn’t worth it. Krebs would like things to remain uncomplicated forever. He takes comfort in an almost mystical truth he learned in the army: “When you were really ripe for a girl you always got one. You did not have to think about it. Sooner or later it would come.”

Apart from his preoccupation with girls, Krebs feels all right: “Things were getting good again.” He appears content to remain in his detached state indefinitely.

Unfortunately, his parents do not share his equanimity. They feel dismayed over their son’s idleness and lack of ambition. The story’s climactic episode is a difficult conversation—mostly a lecture—between Krebs and his mother. This scene, contrasting the banal, workaday values with which the young man was raised against the alienated consciousness that trauma has produced in him, is one of Hemingway’s most remarkable passages, and quite rightly it receives the most critical attention.

Just prior to this scene, however, often overlooked, Krebs holds a friendly chat with his younger sister. Helen, perhaps 10 or 11 years old, dutifully brings her brother the morning paper, then sits at the breakfast table, just watching him read and eat cereal. She then invites him to come to her school that afternoon to see her play indoor baseball:

“I can pitch better than lots of the boys. I tell them all you taught me. The other girls aren't much good."

"Yeah?" said Krebs.

"I tell them all you're my beau. Aren't you my beau, Hare?"

"You bet."

"Couldn't your brother really be your beau just because he's your brother?"

"I don't know."

"Sure you know. Couldn't you be my beau, Hare, if I was old enough and if you wanted to?"

"Sure. You're my girl now."

"Am I really your girl?"

"Sure."

"Do you love me?"

"Uh, huh."

"Do you love me always?"

"Sure."

"Will you come over and watch me play indoor?"

"Maybe."

"Aw, Hare, you don't love me. If you loved me, you'd want to come over and watch me play indoor."

Prosaic on the surface, this makes for a puzzling exchange in the context of the story. Helen has little to do with the action. We can brush it off as a cute interlude, a sister so happy to have her idolized big brother home safe and letting him know in her clumsy, puppyish way how much she loves him. The problem is, Ernest Hemingway didn’t waste time on cute interludes. “Soldier’s Home” is a carefully honed work of literature—the author himself considered it his best short story—and so we must ask why he chose to give Krebs a sister and to insert her here to hold precisely this conversation. Was it simply to provide Krebs with a pal, one person in this town whom he likes and feels comfortable around? Or, perhaps, is Helen meant to represent Krebs himself, the wide-eyed innocent he was before leaving his small town for the World War? The former explanation sounds nice but seems a slender justification for the girl’s presence; the latter is both imprecise and sentimental (while Hemingway was neither). The siblings’ conversation may enhance the story, but it is not integral. Helen could be eliminated entirely with no real loss to the narrative.

But read it again. Forget for the moment that the speakers are a brother, aged about 20, and his kid sister. Helen is offering herself to Krebs as a lover. Read simply as words on a page it is hard to interpret this passage any other way. If a 17-year-old neighbor girl had dropped by to speak something like Helen’s lines, we’d have no doubt that the prophecy which army life taught Krebs had been fulfilled.  

End Part 1. In Part 2 of this blog, the author will explore more extensively the underage incestuous undertones of “A Soldier’s Home.”

About the Author

Christopher More is a freelance writer, actor, and rare book dealer, residing in the arts-oriented mountain community of Idyllwild, California. He is currently at work on a theatrical adaptation of several of Hemingway’s early short stories, tentatively entitled, Hemingway in Seven Acts.

Ernest Hemingway in Chicago

By Scott Holleran, in “Classic Chicago Magazine”

In his article, “Ernest Hemingway in Chicago,” recently publishedin “Classic Chicago Magazine,” author Scott Holleran takes the reader on a tour of places and people around the world important throughout Hemingway’s life. The first is Oak Park, IL, the village immediately to the west of Chicago, where Hemingway was born, raised, and educated. There, at the local high school, Hemingway first learned the crafts of journalism and fiction. That experience got him a job as a newspaper reporter at the Kansas City Star, where he learned the kind of spare prose that characterized his writing throughout his career.

Holleran notes several other details from Hemingway’s life, including his love of the outdoors. His father took him fishing on the Des Plaines River, just west of his home. And the family vacationed each summer at Walloon Lake, about a full day’s drive northeast of Chicago in Michigan, where Hemingway hunted and fished.

Other places and stories in Holleran’s article include Hemingway’s Finca Vigia home in Cuba. Some of Hemingway’s best and most productive years came in Cuba. There, he could also fish in the Gulf Stream on his boat, the Pilar, a 38-foot cabin cruiser. Cuba turned out to have a sad ending, however, after Hemingway lost most of what he had there following the Communist takeover.

For the article, Holleran interviewed two Hemingway scholars. One, Dr. Nancy Sindelar, is the author most recently of Hemingway’s Passions: His Women, His Writing, His Wars. Sindelar also sits on the Board of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park.

The other scholar is Paul Hendrickson, author of Hemingway’s Boat. Hendrickson quotes a phrase from the writer, “I could never be lonely along the river.” Hendrickson believes that Hemingway was “lonely as a writer and a human being.” But “he could go to the river and see that moving peace of water, or, watching an old Parisian fisherman, he could never be lonely along the river.”

-              Dr. Craig Mindrum, Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park

Read Holleran’s full article at <link>.

Scott Holleran is Classic Chicago Magazine’s Short Story Editor. He lived in Chicago for 21 years and writes the non-fictional “Industrial Revolutions” column as well as short stories. Read his first book, Long Run: Short Stories Volume One, and his non-fiction, Autonomia, at scottholleran.substack.com.

The Hemingway Family and the Influenza Epidemic

By Rose Marie Burwell

Nevade “Vada” Belle Hemingway visiting with Grace Hall Hemingway in Oak Park, IL in early 1918.

Grace Hall Hemingway was very close to her only sibling, Leicester Hall, and gave her last son her brother’s name—as she had given her first son his maternal grandfather’s name. Their correspondence (in the Hemingway family papers at the University of Texas) documents the mutual sensitivity and concern of Grace and her brother during and after the Spanish influenza period.

Leicester was practicing law in California when he was called for military duty. His wife, Vada, died of influenza on 6 November 1918. On 23 December, he wrote to Grace that he had received her letter of sympathy before he was notified that his wife had died and he did not, at first, understand the subject of which she was talking. On his return to California, he stopped to see Grace and her family in Oak Park. From his letter to her after his return home, it is clear that Leicester had noted a high level of tension in the Hemingway household, and that Grace confided to him some things about its source. In fact, he asks her if his letters to her are opened and read by her alone and invites her to bring the “little children” and come visit him for a few months, offering to pay her fare.

Grace and her youngest son, “little Leicester,” went to California for nearly six months. She enrolled him in kindergarten there and set about bringing to order Leicester’s home, which had been left exactly as it was at Vada’s death. One cannot but feel the poignancy in Grace’s accounts of her daily work: the last laundry Vada had done was lying folded on the dining room table, no cleaning had been done, and her brother had given little attention to his own living conditions.

In the milieu of Leicester’s mourning, Grace also had to cope with daily letters from her husband, Clarence, that are rife with mentions of how tired he is and how badly he needs her presence. The fatigue seems to be mingled with depression, to which he was susceptible, and with anxiety, which was nearly constant throughout his life. His emotional neediness and fatigue may also have been exacerbated by the fact that, although Oak Park had comparatively fewer cases of influenza, the infected were primarily cared for at home—by a public health recommendation—and physicians must have made many house calls. Further, a physician had to accompany every troop train originating in the Chicago area to its induction destination.

An Oak Park man died at the Great Lakes Naval Training Facility, but the regular instructions on the recognition and treatment of influenza can be seen in the Oak Leaves during the summer and fall of 1918. After Grace’s return to Oak Park, Leicester advises his sister:

“I hope your trials are not as great as they have been and that some kind of solution may gradually work out ...”

We will probably never know what the specific points of conflict were between the Hemingways at the time, but in these family papers the drama of filial devotion is framed by the influenza pandemic in these two households half a continent apart. Love in the time of influenza, indeed!

Rose Marie Burwell (1934-2020) is the author of Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels (Cambridge U.P., 1996).  She served on the Boards of The Hemingway Society and the Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, and held Fellowships from the National Foundation for the Humanities, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and Princeton University Library.  She was an emeritus professor at Northern Illinois University where she taught courses in the English Novel and in Modern American Fiction.

This article was published in the Hemingway Foundation Spring/Summer Dispatch 2008

The Empty Chair by Veryan Williams-Wynn

The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park (EHFOP) publishes an annual literary journal through a short story contest.  This journal is designed to capture new voices engaged in the creative writing process, in fiction. First published in 2016, the series of journals titled, "Hemingway Shorts," recognizes an overall winner who will receive a cash award plus an additional ten finalists of the short story contest, giving established and emerging writers the opportunity to see their work published. Below please find the 2018 Hemingway Shorts Award Winning Short Story.

2018 Hemingway Shorts Award Winning Short Story

The Empty Chair by Veryan Williams-Wynn (Devon, United Kingdom)

Stanley’s heavy-rimmed glasses had slipped cockeyed on the damp surface of his red-veined nose, exposing his rheumy eyes, and there

they rested until the sound of Frank’s voice in the hall jolted him out of his dark musings. He hurriedly brushed a hand across his eyes,

blew his nose and replaced his glasses, but not before Frank had time to register exactly how his old friend was feeling. As Stanley

struggled to get to his feet, Frank placed a hand firmly on his shoulder and pushed him back into the armchair where his woolly-grey head

slumped back against the yellow-stained antimacassar.

“How you doing?” Frank asked, his voice overly loud with forced cheerfulness.

“Coping. I’m coping.”

“Had something to eat?”

Stanley didn’t answer. He just stared unseeing at the silent television screen. What was there to say? She’d always done the shopping,

cooking, wouldn’t let him near the kitchen she wouldn’t, not even at Christmas when the dishes were piled high after having

friends come round. No, he couldn’t cook and he didn’t feel inclined to start at this stage in his life: What was the point now that she was

gone? Anyway, he’d been to Patel’s that morning and stocked up with a supply of corned beef, tinned soups, frozen meals for one,

cornflakes, a six-pack and a bottle of the best Scotch available from the corner shop.

“Since you refuse to come over to our place, Joan said I was to make sure you were eating properly.”

“I’ve got food, I’ll eat when I’m hungry.”

Frank noticed the defiant clenching of Stanley’s jaw as he spoke; his lopsided cardigan buttoned up crooked and the creased shirt.

Sheila would have as soon had those straightened out, had him looking neat and tidy. One thing about him hadn’t changed though

– he was still wearing a tie. Stan had never been seen without a tie ever, even in high summer. He was surprised though at him going

to pieces like this, but then he’d always been full of surprises. For one thing, none of his friends had thought to see him marry, such

a curmudgeonly old bachelor he’d become, when going on fifty he quite suddenly announced he was marrying Sheila from the local

pharmacy. And now Frank thought he’d never be surprised by anything Stan did ever again.

“Good, I’ll put the kettle on then, shall I?”

Frank returned from the kitchen carrying two mugs of tea, and having handed one to Stanley was about to sit down in the vacant

armchair opposite him when he thought better of it and pulled up a chair from beside the table.

“You can sit there if you want.”

“Nah. It doesn’t seem right somehow ... never sat there before, did I?

That’s her chair.”

“Was her chair.” Stanley said, his eyes welling again.

For the last twenty years, every evening year in, year out with seldom a break, Sheila had sat opposite him in that same chair. In the early

days of their marriage, she would do mending and darning; she was good at sewing. Then she took up knitting and every evening after the

dishes were done, he would watch the television to the accompaniment of her clicking needles, and it was her of course who’d crocheted

the antimacassars to protect the chair backs. Little in the ordered routine of their lives changed over the years and Stan hadn’t noticed her

restlessness, not that was, until she enrolled in a Tai-Chi class when her chair would be empty every Thursday evening. He had objected at

first as it meant having to have their evening meal early, but he soon got used to that and he couldn’t really complain since he left her alone

every Tuesday and Saturday when he went to the club for a few rounds with the boys and the occasional game of cards.

“You want to talk about it?”

“There’s nothing to talk about ... I’ve got to get on with it, haven’t I?”

“How about getting out – come down to the club again?”

“No,” he shouted, “how can I?”

“You’ll have to face the lads again sometime.”

Stanley looked up, his face convulsed, “I was such a damned fool, I should have known something was wrong, done something,” he

said banging his fist down on the arm of his chair.

“When did you first suspect things weren’t right?”

Stanley leaned forward resting his head in his gnarled hands.

“It was months ago, maybe a year back. I was dropping a customer off at the hospital. A regular she was – twice a week for months I’d

drive her to St. Thomas, wait in my cab listening to the radio while she had treatment, and then drive her home. It was while I was waiting

one day that I saw Sheila come out of the main entrance. It gave me quite a shock seeing her there, not that she looked sick or anything, in

fact she was quite dressed up for her. That evening I asked her if she was ill, but no – she said she’d been visiting a friend, a colleague she

worked with at the pharmacy. I believed her,even when I saw her at the hospital again some months later.”

“When did she actually tell you?”

“She didn’t. Never said a word. The first I knew of it was that night at the club,” he hissed through gritted teeth.

“Did you not talk to each other, discuss things?”

“Sometimes. I’d tell her about some of the fares I’d picked up, about the odd characters who’d get in my cab, like the geezer with a goat,

but there wasn’t much to tell really, was there?”

“And Sheila?”

“She used to natter on all the time at first – can’t say I took much notice, just the usual stuff about work. Once or twice she tried to get me to

go away on a trip, you know, one of those package holidays to some hot foreign place, but I’ve never been one for going abroad – not liking

strange food or understanding the lingo – so we never went away, except once to the Broads fishing.”

“Fishing? Sheila!”

“She didn’t fish, I did.”

“Did she mind?”

“Never said if she did,” he said, glaring at Frank over the top of his glasses.

“She wouldn’t would she, too quiet for her own good ....”

“Huh! And mine as it turned out.”

While Stanley returned his gaze to the silent action on the television, Frank took note of his friend’s knit brow and felt the barely concealed

anger seething inside him.

“You ever tell her about the horses – your visits to the betting office every weekend?”

“Don’t be daft!”

“And the poker games in the back room on Tuesday nights?”

“None of her business; anyway, it never amounted to much.”

“Bleeding hell Stan, what do you call not much?”

“That last game – well, that was different – the rest were just a few quid here and there, you know that.”

“I know, club rules, but to bet ....”

“It would never have happened if that foreign doctor from the hospital hadn’t come looking for me and come out with all that stuff about

Sheila, what was I supposed to do for god’s sake?”

“Hit him, knocked the living daylights out of him, had him thrown out, anything other than what you did.”

“It made sense at the time; he was as determined to have her as I was to keep her – deadlock.”

“You could have confronted her, but no, you had to wager her in a game of cards! How the hell could you?”

“I could tell at a glance he was no card player and I would have won, but for his bloody luck with that confounded hand.”

“Well, the blokes at the club are all drinking to you now – you’re quite the hero, ‘to Stan who lost his wife to an ace of spades!’ ”

Frank said, raising his mug and downing the remains of his tea.

THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR AND THE HEMINGWAY FAMILY

by Joan Costanza Meister (May 1, 2013)

Anson Hemingway

On January 1, 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. By that date Allen and Harriet Louisa Tyler Hemingway, recent transplants from Connecticut to Illinois, had already buried one son and had two other sons serving in the Union Army.

Six weeks after the firing on Fort Sumter, George Hemingway, age 19, joined the 18th Regiment, Illinois Infantry, Company I on May 28, 1861. Fourteen months later, on August 2, 1862 his brothers, Rodney, 27, and Anson, almost 18, Ernest Hemingway’s grandfather, were mustered into the 72nd Regiment, Illinois Infantry, Company D. Known as the Young Men’s Christian Association regiment, it was composed of men from Cook County.

Rodney and George were two of the five children born to Allen’s first wife, Marietta Lindsley. She died in 1842 at the birth of George. A year later Allen married Harriet and Anson was born on August 26, 1844. In Anson’s remembrances, he describes his mother as,

a brave beautiful Christian woman only 19 years old when she and father were married. He was 45 yrs. old & father of two boys . . . two girls… My mother cared for these 4 just as for her own—and the children of our 2nd group would never have known that there had been another mother if we had not been told about it.

Of the three brothers in the war only Anson returned. George died of dysentery in Cairo, IL on Oct. 17, 1862. Rodney, who was ill throughout his enlistment, was discharged in early April 1863 and died in a Memphis hospital on April 15.

Anson kept a Civil War diary from the summer of 1862 through 1863. On October 21, 1862 he sadly writes, “Father came here today. Brought the news that George was dead . . . Is going to take him home.”

Anson repeatedly wrote of illness that plagued the troops, his brother Rodney and himself:

Feb. 1, 1863, A cool day, I was camp guard. I have a toothache, Rodney was sick; Feb. 7, Rodney quite down . . .; Feb. 8: Rodney went to the hospital, He is quite sick; Feb. 20, Saw Rodney he is getting better; June 4, sent a letter home with Rodney’s death certificate.

In the Grand Army of the Republic war sketches, Anson recorded his memories:  

My first battle was the siege of Vicksburg (May 18-July 4, 1863) and engagements around there---was in several ‘close’ places but no other engagements. Was never wounded, was never a prisoner, but had a very narrow escape while recruiting our Colored Regt. in Louisiana.

Anson was commissioned as a 1st Lieutenant in Company H, U.S. Colored 70th Regiment on March 30 1864 at Natchez, MS. The accompanying photo was taken in Natchez. Although the photo is not dated, it was taken after the assassination of President Lincoln in April of 1865. The braid and tassel on the left arm of Anson’s uniform was adopted after the assassination in honor of the dead commander- in- chief. (Information from the Civil War Reenactment Society) 

In late February or early March 1866, Anson was discharged, nearly a year after the South surrendered. He returned home very changed, from the slightly-built, inexperienced seventeen-year-old to a man who commanded others in battle. He suffered the loss of two older brothers and many friends. He witnessed disease, suffering and destruction. His faith had sustained him during the war years as it would the rest of his life. On returning home, he was ready to accept the responsibility of being the oldest son of the Hemingway family, to continue his education, and to take his place in the middle-class society of Chicago and, ultimately, Oak Park, Illinois.

Note: This brief note on the military career of Anson Hemingway is taken from a longer unpublished paper by the author. A copy of which is in the Hemingway Foundation Archives.

This article was originally published in the Hemingway Foundation Summer Dispatch 2013.

Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and the American Library in Paris

(edited from a ‘Detailed History’ by American Library in Paris staff)

In the closing years of World War I, 1917-1918, hundreds of American libraries, under an initiative of the American Library Association (ALA), launched the Library War Service, a project to send books to the doughboys fighting in the trenches. By the Armistice, nearly a million and a half books had been shipped to Europe.

The American Library in Paris was founded in 1920 by the ALA with a core collection of those wartime books and a motto about the spirit of its creation: Atrum post bellum, ex libris lux: After the darkness of war, the light of books. The library’s charter promised to bring the best of American literature and culture, and library science, to readers in France. It soon found an imposing home at 10, rue de l’Elysée, the palatial former residence of the Papal Nuncio.

The leadership of the early Library was composed of a small group of American expatriates, notably Charles Seeger, father of the young American poet Alan Seeger ("I have a rendezvous with Death"), who died in the war, and great-uncle of folk singer Pete Seeger. Expatriate American author Edith Wharton was among the first trustees of the Library. 

Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, early patrons of the Library, contributed articles to the Library’s periodical, Ex Libris, established in 1923 and which is still published today as a newsletter. In a letter dated January 28, 1925 from Schruns, Austria, Hemingway writes to his Upper Michigan friend, Bill Smith, about a possible secretarial position with Dr. W. Dawson Johnston, Director of the American Library in Paris to help get Ex Libris and a book column Johnston wrote for the Paris Tribune out each month.  Smith did come to Paris that spring and stayed until September but never worked at the Library

Thornton Wilder and Archibald MacLeish borrowed books from the American Library. Stephen Vincent Benét wrote "John Brown’s Body" (1928) at the Library. Sylvia Beach donated books from her lending library when she closed Shakespeare & Co. in 1941.

The Library’s continuing role as a bridge between the United States and France was apparent from the beginning. The French president, Raymond Poincaré, and with French military leaders including Joffre, Foch, and Lyautey, were present when the Library was formally inaugurated. An early chairman of the board was Clara Longworth de Chambrun, member of a prominent Cincinnati family and sister of the U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nicholas Longworth.

A succession of talented American librarians directed the Library through the difficult years of the Depression, when the first evening author programs drew such French literary luminaries as André Gide, André Maurois, Princess Bonaparte, and Colette for readings. Financial difficulties ultimately drove the Library to new premises on the rue de Téhéran in 1936.

With the coming of World War II, the occupation of France by the Nazi regime, and the deepening threats to French Jews, Library director Dorothy Reeder and her staff and volunteers provided heroic service by operating an underground, and potentially dangerous, book-lending service to Jewish members barred from libraries. Dorothy Reeder reminded staff and patrons that The American Library in Paris was a “war baby, born out of that vast number of books sent to the A. E. F. (American Expeditionary Force) by the American Library Association in the last war.  When hostilities ceased, it embarked on a new mission, and has served as a memorial to the American soldiers for whom it has been established.”

When Reeder was sent home for her safety, Countess de Chambrun rose to the occasion to lead the Library. In a classic Occupation paradox, the happenstance of her son’s marriage to the daughter of the Vichy prime minister, Pierre Laval, ensured the Library a friend in high places, and a near-exclusive right to keep its doors open and its collections largely uncensored throughout the war. A French diplomat later said the Library had been to occupied Paris "an open window on the free world."

The Library prospered again in the postwar era as the United States took on a new role in the world, the expatriate community in Paris experienced regeneration, and a new wave of American writers came to Paris - and to the Library. Irwin Shaw, James Jones, Mary McCarthy, Art Buchwald, Richard Wright, and Samuel Beckett were active members during a heady period of growth and expansion. During these early Cold War years, American government funds made possible the establishment of a dozen provincial branches of the American Library in Paris, even one in the Latin Quarter. The Library moved to the Champs-Elysées in 1952. It was at that address that Director Ian Forbes Fraser barred the door to a high-profile visit from Roy Cohn and David Schine,  Senator Joseph McCarthy’s notorious staff members, who were touring Europe in search of "red" books in American libraries.

The Library purchased its current premises, two blocks from the Seine and two blocks from the Eiffel Tower, in 1965 - making way on the Champs Elysées for the Publicis monument, Le Drugstore. On the rue du Général Camou, the Library helped to nurture the growth of the American College of Paris’s fledgling library. Today, as part of the American University in Paris, that library is our neighbor and tenant. The branch libraries ended their connections to the American Library in Paris in the 1990s; three survive under new local partnerships.

By the time of its 75th anniversary, in 1995, the Library’s membership had grown to 2,000. The premises were renovated in the late 1990s, and are undergoing regular updates. In 2009, the reading room was expanded and new audio-visual equipment was installed for programming. The American Library in Paris remains the largest English-language lending library on the European continent.

This article was orignally published in the Hemingway Foundation Spring 2014 Dispatch

HEMINGWAY EXPELLED FROM SCHOOL! (Well, almost)

By Craig Mindrum

In 1917, while a senior at Oak Park High School, Hemingway got into some trouble. He and some buddies got together and published an underground magazine called “Jazz Journal.” In the 1910s, “jazz” was by itself a suggestive word, carrying modern, even scandalous connotations (nightlife, sexual looseness).

One of the magazine co-conspirators, Ray Ohlsen, described the incident:

“We had a paper called the ‘Jazz Journal.’ There was only one copy—about five of us edited it. What we did was put in a lot of dirty jokes and attributed them to some of our teachers. It just happened that while I was practicing for the class play somebody stole the copy I had in my English book. Ernie called me up that night and wanted to know where it was. I told him I had it. He said I'd better look and check and sure enough I couldn't find it. Well, the principal Mr. McDaniel had it and we were in on the carpet.”

Threat of expulsion

The magazine raised enough concern from school authorities and from parents that there was talk of suspension or expulsion. Hemingway and the others involved were summoned to the principal’s office. The magazine was brought out as proof of indecency. There was pressure to punish the boys harshly.

Saved by the play

Hemingway was saved, however, because of an otherwise unrelated fact: He had tried out for the Senior play (“Beau Brimmel”) and got a role. (This had been a dream of his since the time he started school.)

The play was to open the week right after the boys got into trouble. Fortunately for them all, a school teacher and director of the play, Fannie Biggs, interceded for the boys and prevented them from more drastic action.

Hemingway’s buddy Ohlsen continues the story: “We would have all gotten expelled if it weren't for our English teacher Miss Biggs who we thought must have lied and told the principal that we had come to her for advice and that we had promised her we would discontinue the magazine. If it wasn't for her we would have been expelled.”

Ongoing repercussions

Hemingway narrowly avoided trouble, and the play went on as scheduled but repercussions continued in the Hemingway family. Ernest resented the lack of support shown by his parents about the incident. He had a grudge; he felt betrayed by his parents (especially his mother). To him, other boys had more support from their parents than he. For example, one of his classmates got in trouble and his father came to school standing up for him stoutly and saying the school was being too severe. Hemingway blurted out in a group, “Neither of my parents would come to school for me no matter how right I was. I just have to take it.”

Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker treats Hemingway’s high-school skirmishes as early indicators of his lifelong pattern of testing authority and experiencing family conflict over his behavior and writing.

Other biographies agree that this was not mere adolescent mischief. It was a symbolic first instance of literary boundary-testing. 

Source: Buske, Morris R. Hemingway's Education, a Re-Examination: Oak Park High School and the Legacy of Principal Hanna, 2007. Reference Book Collection. Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park Archives, Oak Park Public Library Special Collections, Oak Park, IL.

So I ignored him and wrote two sentences:Hemingway’s advice for lawyers and other writers in A Moveable Feast

By Brian C. Potts*

He was sitting at the next table, a tall fat young man with spectacles. He had ordered a beer. I thought I would ignore him and see if I could write. So I ignored him and wrote two sentences.[1]

It won’t surprise you that Hemingway was sometimes solitary, sometimes gregarious; sometimes warm and sometimes gruff. Who isn’t?

And if you’re a writer, it won’t surprise you that Hemingway—one of the greatest writers ever—often worried about money, especially early in his career.

But would it surprise you that Hemingway—winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature—faced writer’s block?

Would it surprise you that Hemingway rewrote his works over and over and over?

That Hemingway was an early bird?

Hemingway was a model of the hardworking artist not dependent on uncertain muses but on simply sitting down to write. Indeed, I have found that A Moveable Feast—Hemingway’s pseudo-memoir of his Paris years—overflows with blunt advice for lawyers, legal writers, and writers in general.

Reading Hemingway can make you a better writer and a better lawyer. In One True Sentence: Hemingway’s Advice for Lawyers in A Moveable Feast, 25 Journal of Appellate Practice and Process 391 (2025), I glean 35 nuggets of wisdom for lawyers and other writers. Here are some appetizers:

2. Flow 

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.[2]

When you are flowing, keep going. Maintain the flow and finish while you have momentum. If you stop, you waste time figuring out where you were and where you were going.[3]

3. Rewrite 

That fall of 1925 he was upset because I would not show him the manuscript of the first draft of The Sun Also Rises. I explained to him that it would mean nothing until I had gone over it and rewritten it and that I did not want to discuss it or show it to anyone first.[4]

When you finish the first draft and a round of editing, set your work aside and return to it refreshed. Embrace the process of rewriting, editing, and proofreading. There is no great writing. Only great rewriting.[5]

14. Plain language 

If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.[6]

Avoid long wind-ups, legalese, and ornamentation. Use plain language. Write tidysentences. Write simply. And beautifully. And sometimes passionately.

Be honest and clear.[7]

20. War stories

You could always mention a general, though, that the general you were talking to had beaten. The general you were talking to would praise the beaten general greatly and go happily into detail on how he had beaten him.[8]

Cherish your war stories. Some will come earlier in your career than you expect. Keep track of them. When you close a case or a deal or an estate, take the time to write a note to yourself about it. Hemingway was a consummate journaler; in fact, A Moveable Feast is rooted in his journals.  In your own journaling, ask yourself: What was the problem? Where was the drama and intrigue? How did the knot unravel?[9]

24. Walk

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.[10]

Take breaks and good walks to sort through ideas and discover new ones. Many great writers swear by this.[11]

31. Stories

I told Joyce of my first meeting with him in Ezra’s studio with the girls in the long fur coats and it made him happy to hear the story.[12]

“Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.”[13]

Tell clear and compelling stories. They make people happy. So they make people listen.[14]

---

I tell my law students to rejoice that there is no such thing as great writing; only great rewriting. So don’t worry that your first draft is garbage. Of course it is. But you will work hard and your rewriting will be gold. The sooner you start writing, the sooner you can start rewriting. Start with one true sentence. Then ignore distractions and write two more.

---

* For Maria, Mark, and Servant of God Father Patrick Ryan. My thanks to Professor Tessa L. Dysart of the University of Arizona, Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process; to Dr. Craig Mindrum of The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park; and to my Research Assistants Bar Sadeh and Mixa Hernandez.

[1] Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast 92 (Mary Hemingway, ed., 1964).

[2] Id. at 6.

[3] Brian C. Potts, One True Sentence: Hemingway’s Advice for Lawyers in A Moveable Feast, 25 J. App. Prac. and Process 391, 394 (2025).

[4] Hemingway, supra note 1, at 184.

[5] Potts, supra note 3, at 395.

[6] Hemingway, supra note 1, at 12.

[7] Potts, supra note 3, at 402.

[8] Hemingway, supra note 1, at 28.

[9] Potts, supra note 3, at 406.

[10] Hemingway, supra note 1, at 43.

[11] Potts, supra note 3, at 409.

[12] Hemingway, supra note 1, at 129.

[13] Id. at 183.

[14] Potts, supra note 3, at 415.

Considering Cather and Hemingway: An Unlikely Pairing?

By Michael Seefeldt

Speaking of Willa Cather, can anyone of our readers place this Hemingway quote? (Noting his bumping iambs, his simple declarative clauses, his monosyllabic repetitions, and the Bachian musicality in “made me bite my tongue,” “When the straw settled down,” or “from under the buffalo hide.”)

“I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over. When the straw settled down, I had a hard bed. Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

Change the “peered’ to “looked” and remove the “Cautiously” (and a couple of commas) and it is vintage Hemingway. Of course those things are there and it is not, but it is very close, and some of you may have recognized Jim Burton’s wonderment in an opening scene from Willa Cather’s My Antonia.

“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

“Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”

The first quote is Hemingway writing in his fifties (A Moveable Feast), recalling his early Paris efforts. The second is Cather, in her forties, from The Song of the Lark. More:

“Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole.”

“If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.”

“The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.”

The first and third this time are Cather, from “On the Art of Fiction” in the periodical Borzoi in 1920, and “Four Letters: Escapism” in Commonweal, 1936. The second is a continuation of the previous from A Moveable Feast. Certainly both wrote in a simplified style, eschewing prolix verbiage.

Both also had a close feel for the land, often in reminiscent mode. They wrote rich, but non florid, descriptions of nature, often using nature to create both a spiritual atmosphere and a realistic setting for characters and events. H. R. Stoneback, standing in for Ernest, who tended to be mute on topics closest to his depths, linked the two in his essay “Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway’s Sacred Landscapes” (R&L, 2003, Vol 35.2-3). More prone to address such things openly, Cather used earth metaphors in a similar, if broader vein: “Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.”

They also shared concrete features: both were expatriates of sorts from the middle west, she to the eastern establishment, he to Europe and Cuba; but both drew heavily on a pastoral childhood there. Both started out in journalism, and had significant tenures, she as editor for McClure’s for many years, he as a foreign correspondent in Paris for a couple of salad years, but in various riffs thereafter. Both knew they had to cut themselves from journalism for the sake of their art, but both took with them pristine habits which helped significantly to form that art.

Both wrote great (WW I) war novels, A Farewell to Arms, possibly Hemingway’s most read book, and One of Ours, which won Cather the Pulitzer. Both had subordinated themselves when young before dominating, possibly lesbian literary women: Hemingway with Gertrude Stein (and Alice Toklas); Cather with Annie Fields, widow of James Fields of publisher giants Ticknor and Fields. (Her partner was Sarah Orne Jewett in possibly a “Boston marriage,” i.e., Victorian/Edwardian women living/ loving together, but not physical). And both conveyed in much of their work a languid sense of lost time, futility, even despair; while centering it all on a tested-firm moral core, whether in Antonia’s spit, Alexandra’s powerful solitude in O Pioneers!, or Henry Jordan’s universal Spanish mission. Or Santiago’s perseverance in The Old Man and the Sea, or the grandmother in “Old Mrs. Harris,” Cather’s most famous short story. The list is long and consistent and almost always includes the uncertain mix of success and fatal failure: Cantwell in Across the River, the protagonist of The Professor’s House, the Archbishop to whom death comes.

For a brief spell the fatalistic even creeps directly into their titles — Death Comes to the Archbishop, “A Natural History of the Dead,” and Death in the Afternoon all appearing in a five year window framing the start of the Great Depression (1927-32). And death, solitude, disappointment, or tragedy in love mark central themes throughout the work of both.

Of course they were different, he big and brawling and irreverent, hiding his sentiment; she proper and staid and respectful to the point of morally rejecting Oscar Wilde. He cut a dashing figure, a near Adonis in young manhood; a comely picture of her cannot be found.

Each lost painfully in early love: he with nurse Agnes in Milan; she supposedly with an athletic coed, Louise Pound, at the University of Nebraska. He totaled four wives on three continents, she was with her companion, Edith Lewis, for forty years in New York City. Her works are more quiet, and, being a generation earlier, not born in post World War I disaffection. Her plot line is more slow developing, and often cuts across time separations of a decade or more (Pioneers, Lost Lady, Antonia, Archbishop); his often take but a very few days (To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Across the River the River and Into the Trees, The Old Man and the Sea).

But in the end their deeper similarities should not escape us: each, though differently oriented, knew the darker side. “There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields.” “Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.” Her “There . . . nothing . . . no . . . no . . .no . . . there . . . not . . . there . . . nothing . . . not” ends in the future of the land. His blacker “Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada” does not.

But if you were to try to pick the male and female American novelists of that first half of the twentieth century, you would be hard pressed to improve on their unlikely pairing. Richard Edel, the great Henry James scholar (Hadley’s favorite novelist), was surely a bit in his cups when he said, “The time will come when she’ll be ranked above Hemingway.” But it points us to a fuller awareness of her significance.

(Willa Sibert Cather, 1873-1947; Ernest Miller Hemingway, 1899-1961)

Michael Seefeldt served on the board of the Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park from 1991-2003 in various capacities and was a Professor of Medicine at UIC College of Medicine

This article was first published in the Hemingway Foundation Dispatch Spring 2006