Hemingway Villages
By Redd Griffin
Virginia Cassin and I once led a bus tour of Hemingway site in Oak Park with heads of college English departments. They happened to come from the four continents where Ernest had written. Our tour bus was a microcosm of the global village. I asked our passengers who the most significant author in their curricula was. All but one replied, “Hemingway.”
I then asked them why Hemingway was so highly rated in their departments. An Asian student said it was because his writing was Buddhist; a Latin American, because it was Hispanic; a European, because it was Catholic.
Did they respond this way because Hemingway’s writing faithfully reflected their unique\ ways of life, or because it accurately presented what is common to all of them? Or both?
Whatever the answer, Ernest’s local village of Oak Park probably prepared him to write for a global village. In Oak Park he was first exposed to diverse cultures. He grew up in a family intensely involved with cultures from beyond American borders. His mother, father and their kin celebrated their English heritage and supported their families’ and churches’ missionaries abroad. His extended family and community took advantage of metropolitan Chicago’s multicultural riches, inspired by the World’s Columbian Exposition that occurred just six years before Ernest was born.
His family helped him focus on aspects of life experience all human beings share. Through his father, a physician/ naturalist, he began to discover what was universal in the outside world; and through his mother, a musician/artist, what was universal in the inner world. Through his parents’ and grandparents’ lives and reflections, he became aware of the ultimate realities human beings encounter: love and hate, faith and doubt, good and evil, life and death.
The name “Hemingway, E.M.” along with hundreds of others on the Scoville Park war memorial in Oak Park marks Ernest’s transition from his local village to the global village beyond.
Ernest had an Oak Park address when he was severely wounded overseas in World War I, and he returned home to recover. One day he received a letter from a nurse in Italy ending their relationship that began during the war. In effect, his life at this point merged two villages— local and global. Later his writing would.
These life-changing experiences from 1918 through 1919 inspired his ground- breaking novel of love during war, A Farewell to Arms. His first widely successful book reached readers who related to its 20th century agonies and ecstasies. In this and many other stories, Hemingway captured the best and worst of life in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. He communicated to his readers what is universal in people’s lives, because of their common humanity. He expressed this directly in the prologue to For Whom the Bell Tolls:
“No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine” (from a sermon by John Donne).
Like our namesake, our Foundation links our local and global villages. Here visitors from all continents seek information from our volunteers and staff and visit our sites and website. In conferences, discussions, tours, exhibits, performances, print materials and audio-visual productions, the Foundation shares a fellow Oak Parker’s discoveries exploring life here and beyond our village.
Redd Griffin (1938-2012) was Oak Park’s greatest champion of Ernest Hemingway, serving on the board of the Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, which he co-founded in 1983. He was also a co-founder of the Wright Trust (1974) and the Historical Society of Oak Park-River Forest (1968). Griffin worked at the Chicago City News Bureau and WTTW. He also served as an Oak Park Township Trustee and a state representative of the state's 81st and 82nd General Assemblies.
This article was first published in the Hemingway Foundation Spring Dispatch 2006.