There’s been loose talk going around Oak Park about staging a “running of the bulls” this summer. Not real bulls–Oak Park has a pooper-scooper law–but a charity footrace in which players from the NBA Bulls would challenge what organizers describe, with a straight face, as Oak Park’s macho males.
Hemingway is still being read; during the Reagan years, for example, his bwana’s approach to the third world became fashionable again. More impressive, he is still being written about. Ten book-length studies of Hemingway have appeared since 1981 alone, and controversies about the posthumous publication of such unfinished work as his novel Garden of Eden have kept Hemingway’s name in the headlines. His life has even inspired a TV miniseries (which may have been the perfect marriage of content and form).
Tall tales every one. True, Hemingway did not go to college, instead using family connections to land a newspaper job in Kansas City. That was unusual. Going to college was for north Oak Parkers what going down into the pits was for the sons of Welsh miners–a remarkable two-thirds of the graduating seniors at Oak Park High School in those days did so. The decision probably reflected the boy’s inveterate romantic streak more than rebellion, however; while he was away playing the hard-bitten reporter, his mother regularly mailed him cookies.
The incident–which was central in both his life and fiction–grew in boldness and bloodiness with each retelling, first in letters home and later in press interviews and speeches in Oak Park, where he’d returned in 1919 to convalesce. (This he did mainly by strutting about town in uniform with a cane and a black cape he’d had tailored for him in Milan.) The credulity of his audiences–mostly schoolchildren and club women–spurred him to invention. Eventually he would claim that he’d been the first American wounded in Italy and had served as a first lieutenant with Italy’s crack 69th Infantry, Brigata Ancona. He further insisted that, in addition to his shrapnel wounds, he had been felled by machine-gun fire that left his legs riddled with 32 .45-caliber bullets, and that in spite of that punishment he had carried a wounded Italian officer, Rambolike, 150 yards to safety.
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Even the people who liked Hemingway inadvertently confirm his unpleasantness. In the oral history collection Yesterday When I Was Younger, Lewis Clarahan, a Hemingway high school chum and hiking companion, recalled how Hemingway used to say insulting things to people just for fun. Clarahan also recalled Hemingway’s lying, his recklessness, his desperate need to be, as Clarahan put it, “on top of everything.” For example, Hemingway knocked out the smaller Clarahan while boxing, a foretaste of a career in which he never took on anyone in the ring who was as big, as sober, or as skilled as he was.
Hemingway’s boyhood in Oak Park, it turns out, was indeed cruelly unhappy, but Oak Park had little directly to do with that. This is not to say that turn-of-the-century Oak Park offered much scope to a boy eager to make an impression. At the same time, the town never was as narrow a place as Hemingway liked to recall it. It was socially more complex than a sheltered boy was able to comprehend. South Oak Park was already mostly Irish, Catholic, and Democratic in those years, a world away from the Hemingways’ north Oak Park neighborhood. The town’s ban on taverns suggested hypocrisy to Hemingway, since Oak Parkers still drank heartily enough in their homes and clubs; in fact the dry rule had less to do with alcohol than with the town’s fears of working-class undesirables who might frequent the places where it was served.
Despite the hold his hometown apparently had on him, Hemingway was almost alone among recent American writers in completely ignoring it as a setting and topic. As Reynolds pointed out in The Young Hemingway, “It’s hard to imagine Faulkner not writing about Oxford, Mississippi, or Steinbeck leaving the Salinas Valley out of his fiction. It is almost axiomatic that American authors write about their home towns, yet Hemingway did not.” His heroes were all homeless men, and he left untouched the trove of fictive raw material in his clan, whose members included famous missionaries to China and Civil War heroes–and even rich Uncle Tyler, who once proposed to the maid.
