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THE FOREVER BOY

It was a bloody affair on both sides, this battle for San Juan Hill in Cuba in 1898, a year before Ernest Hemingway was born in a large gabled house in a comfortable suburb of Chicago: Oak Park, Illinois. The slouch-hatted volunteers of Colonel “Teddy” Roosevelt’s Rough Riders stormed the heights of San Juan, with bayonets and blood-curdling screams, in the Spanish-American war to liberate native Cubans from their cruel Spanish overlords. In the attack more Americans were killed than occupying Spaniards. Nevertheless, it was a great patriotic victory for Col. Roosevelt, with his barrel-chested body and awesome mustache and flashing teeth, leading from the front on a white horse, waving on his troops, a raggle-taggle of cowboys, gold prospectors, adventurers, Native Americans, and African-American “Buffalo Soldiers.” The Rough Riders became famous overnight.

“T.R.,” later our youngest president, became a sensation in the tabloid press and pro-war newspapers. He almost predicted Hemingway in his personal contradictions. T.R. was both a nature preservationist and a big-animal hunter for pleasure. He was worshipped by the general public and, more importantly, adored by American boys, who improvised their own little versions of the Rough Rider uniform. T.R.’s bared-teeth grin was a staple of the lurid pulp magazines that young Ernest, a soprano in the church choir, devoured along with rootin’-tootin’ dime novels, with their popular mixture of adventure-romance, cowardice, disgrace, redemption, and racism, such as H. Rider Haggard’s colonialist Africa-located white-man’s-fantasies like King Solomon’s Mines and A.E.W. Mason’s The Four Feathers, in which the residents of Sudan are “fuzzy-wuzzies.” Rudyard Kipling of the Just So Stories and The Jungle Book was Ernest’s favorite, and as a father, he’d later read these stories aloud over and over again to his three sons.

Ernest remained bookish all his life. He devoured literature—anything from comic strips to the classics—like an animal needing nourishment. But he was the opposite of a nerd. Like his idol the hyperactive T.R., Ernie was a social being, playing (clumsily) football and baseball and involved in many school functions.

T.R., our American “cowboy president,” a high priest of super-masculinity and preacher of the cult of “the strenuous life,” made such an impact on the boy Ernest that thirty years later, when Hemingway was a celebrated author, he hired the former president’s African guide on his own animal-slaughtering safari.

Young Ernest could not have chosen a more paradoxical role model. Teddy (who loathed this nickname) was a primal force of nature who by sheer will power had overcame a frail body and near-fatal childhood illness (asthma) to reinvent himself as a sword-slashing, swaggering soldier; a predatory imperialist; a racist admirer of “primitive” native cultures; pioneer environmentalist; and a doting father who on a single 1909 African trip “collected” (shot) over 11,000 (!) beasts. He evangelized for a religion of being tough and unbreakable. As president he suffered a serious chest bullet wound when a crazy assassin shot him on a speaking tour in Milwaukee. With blood dripping through his shirt, T.R. refused to quit the platform and orated for the next hour before seeking medical treatment. “Friends,” he cheerfully told the crowd, “I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible … I have just been shot.”

T.R. was Hemingway before there was a Hemingway.

Teddy Roosevelt in uniform

Today, Hemingway’s Oak Park, Illinois 60302, is one of the richest ZIP codes in the state, a Chicago suburb famous as an architectural testing ground for Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Prairie Style” homes, built when a young Hemingway was growing up there. Wright could be sarcastic about Oak Park, where there were “so many churches for so many good people to go to,” but it was a pleasant and very conservative place for a boy to grow up in.

Ernest’s Oak Park was upper-middle class with tree-lined avenues and “good” schools. Today it votes liberal but not in Ernest’s time, when it was all white and solidly church-going and benevolent to its large servant class. The first African-American family did not move in until 1950. Their house was dynamited.

Unlike other “Chicago writers” such as Sherwood Anderson, James T. Farrell, Richard Wright, and Nelson Algren, Hemingway was raised comfortably in a spacious three-story house with eaves and turrets and a wide verandah that his mother, Grace, had designed herself. Grace was a formidable woman—a psalm-singing, strong-willed suffragette who had given up a career in opera to marry a manic-depressive obstetrician, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, and raise their brood of six children, four of them girls. However, in their own cautious Midwestern way the Hemingways were less conventional than their neighbors. Clarence cooked and cleaned, Grace sometimes made more money than her husband by giving music lessons, and they both taught their daughters, as well as their sons, to shoot and fish and—quite bohemian this—ride a bicycle!

Hemingway’s family portrait. Left to right: Ursula, Clarence, Ernest, Grace, and Marcelline

Ernest was a boy in a house brimming with female energy, from his mother and four sisters— Marceline, Sunny, Carol, and Ursula. His brother Leicester was 16 years younger, not much company for Ernest. Grace, with more “zip and go” than she knew what to do with, poured most of that loving energy into Ernest, insisting that he say his prayers, sing solo soprano in their Congregational church, and learn to play the cello. As was a custom then, Grace dressed Ernest and his slightly older sister Marceline as twins in girls’ curls and dresses. Freudians love to make much of Ernest, later a world-famous icon of machismo, being dressed in female skirts as a child. In fact, dressing a boy in girls’ clothes up to a certain age was common in Victorian families.

Clarence took Ernest with him on fishing and hunting trips in the Michigan woods where father and son powerfully bonded. Father taught little Ernest to shoot, to scout the best trout streams, to hunt for live wormy bait under rotten logs, and to know the secrets of semi-wild “UP,” the upper peninsula of Michigan, where the Hemingways had a cottage and some land on Walloon Lake near Petoskey. Photographs of seven-year-old Ernest, fishing rod in hand, look like illustrations from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by one of Hemingway’s favorite authors, Mark Twain.

Young Hemingway fishing at Horton’s Creek

Young Ernest loved the outdoors, especially the forest’s hidden places, like a shadowed stream or a dark swamp. The whole family spent hot Midwest summers in the cool of Lake Walloon with its woods and creeks. Ernest learned to go off by himself to fish, to shoot squirrels, and sometimes, best of all, to take the rowboat alone into strange murky waters. He took intense pride in overcoming his fears. His strong body responded joyfully to confronting the elemental physical challenges, getting lost and then finding himself in the mysterious woods. With his father’s blessing and instruction, he gutted the fish he caught and learned to use a gun and his one good eye—he’d inherited poor vision from Grace—in tracking small animals.

Hemingway with friends at Lake Walloon

To push beyond your limits in extreme physical exercise was a badge of pride for many Protestant middle-class boys at the time. Teddy Roosevelt set an example for intense calisthenics, all part of a widespread evangelical movement, almost a cult, of “muscular Christianity” to which Grace and Clarence had been passionately devoted.

Muscular Christianity meant Jesus in a gym. You did sports to develop self-discipline and the ability to take pain—part of the “code” of an English gentleman as dramatized in the popular novels of the Anglican priest Charles Kingsley (Westward Ho, Hereward the Wake) and Thomas Hughes (Tom Brown’s School Days). Ultimately, of course, you sought to emulate the Supreme Sacrifice of Our Savior on the Cross. You exercised your body to respect God and to be worthy of the Perfect Man, Jesus. “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me,” was a popular prayer. In the great short story “Today Is Friday,” Ernest imagines the conversation of three Roman soldiers who speared Jesus on the Cross and express their admiration for how the Savior took the agonizing pain.

As a grownup, Hemingway found a less religious reason to work out: as a cure for the lifelong depression he called melancholia. “Had a spell when I was pretty gloomy,” he once wrote in a letter understating his torment. “… But decided that I wasn’t getting enough exercise or something so have been going out and driving myself in the boat for a while in any kind of weather and am o.k. now. It is better to produce half as much, get plenty of exercise and not go crazy than to speed up so that your head is hardly normal.”

Good advice, although Hemingway’s lifelong habit of tossing off advice should be approached with caution. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed” or “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” Which of course is pure bunk.

A jock at Oak Park-River Forest High School, Ernest was a mediocre but ferocious competitor at baseball, swimming, and water polo, as well as being a football lineman (he wasn’t agile enough for the backfield). If there was a school extracurricular activity, Ernie dove in—debating, managing the track team, playing cello in the school orchestra, and developing a killer instinct at boxing where he proudly punched an opponent into unconsciousness, and got his nose broken. He could display a gallant side; he was the first to jump in to save three Oak Park High girls trapped in a runaway elevator.

He wrote Kipling-influenced adolescent poetry for the school magazine the Trapeze, and was lucky enough to be in a high school journalism class with the excellent Mrs. Pringle, who encouraged him to write his first articles for Tabula, the campus newspaper. These first efforts were predictably blood-soaked tales of cowboys and Indians as well as a “humor” column he signed with the pen name “Ring Lardner, Jr.” after the famous sportswriter and satirist.

In late adolescence, restlessness hit him like the measles. Like Huck Finn, he was itchy to “light out for the territory,” and ran away from home a couple of times. Though Grace’s cello practice sessions and mandatory choir bored him, he later claimed that her lessons taught him contrapuntal word-music—different voices coming in at the same time—seen in novels like For Whom The Bell Tolls.

As high school graduation day loomed, his parents assumed he would go on to university. His father wanted his first-born son to become a doctor like him, and Grace’s ambition was for Ernest to attend a “good” college to smooth out his rough edges. Instead, Ernest used a family connection to bluff his way onto the Kansas City Star newspaper as a cub reporter. This abrupt shift shocked his parents, if only because “K.C.,” like Chicago, had a reputation for crime and corruption and sexual immorality. Sinful, jazz-loving Kansas City was an eye-opener for Ernest who, aside from hunting and fishing trips, had never been away from home. Judging by his later K.C.-based short stories like “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” (a young man castrates himself) and “A Pursuit Race” (about a heroin user in a burlesque show), Ernest was able to use the newspaper’s crime beat in the city’s blood-spattered alleys and emergency rooms for his future literary material (his news stories are accessible at http://www.kansascity.com/hemingway).

The Star had a brilliant newspaper editor who would permanently influence Hemingway’s writing. Pete Wellington had invented the paper’s Style Guide as a bible for his reporters, which even today is a model for writers. “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English …” Wellington demanded accuracy, clarity, simplicity, and no unnecessary flourishes. “Eliminate every superfluous word … avoid use of adjectives …” Hemingway later credited the newspaper’s style bible as “the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing … I’ve never forgotten them.”

The style sheet was a mere piece of paper, but 18-year-old Ernest also needed a male beau ideal other than his often-depressed, increasingly passive-aggressive, and at times abusive, father (in bad moods Clarence even razor-stropped the girls). He found such a man in an older reporter, Lionel Moise, “a big, brutal son of a bitch,” as recalled by a Star sports writer from the time. Hard-drinking and broad-shouldered, Moise had a habit of beating up women. But he was a fine newspaperman who believed that writing should be hard-boiled, full of action, and should tell a story with a minimum of description. Ernest dogged Moise’s footsteps and modeled himself after this opinionated tough guy. It’s here, at seventeen, he began his lifelong drinking habit.

Poor Grace had every reason to worry about Ernest’s morals in boisterous Kansas City, famous for its whorehouses, where talented African-American jazz players competed against one another in late-hours musical “cutting contests.” Young Hemingway had a magnificent pair of ears for dialogue and everything else going on around him. If you play the “literary influence” game, how about Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, and Big Joe Turner, not to mention K.C.’s unique syncopated, bluesy “stride” piano style?

In the seven months Ernest worked on the Star, his prose swiftly matured from high school horseplay to close to the prose style we know as “Hemingwayese.” Take this example from a Star deadline item titled “At the End of the Ambulance Run”:

The night ambulance attendants shuffled down the long, dark corridors at the General Hospital with an inert burden on the stretcher. They … lifted the unconscious man to the operating table. His hands were calloused and he was unkempt and ragged, a victim of a street brawl near the city market. No one knew who he was, but a receipt, bearing the name of George Anderson, for $10 paid on a home out in a little Nebraska town, served to identify him.

The surgeon opened the swollen eyelids. The eyes were turned to the left. “A fracture on the left side of the skull,’’ he said to the attendants who stood about the table. “Well, George, you’re not going to finish paying for that home of yours.’’