A MOVEABLE READ BLOG

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.”)

As the Director of the English Honors Program here at Western Kentucky University, I developed a course entitled “Honors Hemingway and Faulkner,” and I have taught this class each fall for over a decade.

It was a pleasant Wendy's. I ordered a cup of coffee and took it out front to a cement table, just feet from gridlocked Harlem Avenue. Next door, cars rolled in and out of a Shell station at the corner of Higgins Road in northeast Illinois. To the West, stacks of empty balconies fronted a series of tall, brick apartment buildings. Thunderous Kennedy expressway traffic roared past in a gulch 200 feet to the north. I had arrived at the farm of Ernest Hemingway’s great-grandfather.

To wrap up our discussion of his earliest writing, I’m going to take a look at Three Stories and Ten Poems, his official first book (1923). I’ll focus on two of the three stories in the book, then discuss some of his poems.

Ernest Hemingway published In Our Time in 1925, a year when people still were reeling from the impact of World War I. Hemingway and others had believed World War I was going to be the war to end all wars but quickly learned it was a futile blood bath. There were no heroes—just passive victims hit by shells in trenches, poisoned with gas, or scorched by flame-throwers.

In my first blog on Hemingway’s early book, in our time (1924) I wrote that the short vignettes within the book show how Hemingway’s distinctive voice was forming.

Where did that style come from? One profound influence was his work as a reporter for the Kansas City Star when he was 18. Though he only stayed seven months, the paper’s style guide—favoring short sentences, active verbs, and ruthless clarity—became the foundation of his literary voice. He later said it was “the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing.”

A strange book, containing the seeds of Hemingway’s mature style

What was Hemingway’s “first book”? Some confusion or disagreement exists in the biographical literature about which of Hemingway’s books came first.

Then I'll just have to find some other way of persuading Ernest Hemingway to get out of my head, to move along, to find some other poor soul to bother. Ignoring him doesn't work. Hemingway's stubborn ghost just hangs around, sporting a slight smile on that broad handsome face, a smile that tends to drift toward a know-it-all smirk. His fists are usually planted on his hips and his feet are spread wide apart, as if he's bracing for impact from an onrushing linebacker -- or maybe just a disgruntled literary critic.

Fourth in a series of conversations with Nancy Sindelar about her new book, Hemingway’s Passions: His Women, His Wars, and His Writing. Available here. Check out the first three blogs at #1, #2, and #3, and watch a preview of the book.

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.”