Ernest Hemingway: The Oak Park Legacy. . - Reviews - book review

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1998 by Thomas K. Meier

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: THE OAK PARK LEGACY, edited by James Nagel. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1996. x 231pages. $19.95.

The Oak Park Legacy, a collection of 11 solid essays with a useful introduction by the editor, emerged from a conference in Hemingway's boyhood hometown during the summer of 1993. The essays are grouped into four categories, "The Oak Park Background," "The Early Fiction," "Later Work: A Farewell to Oak Park," and an "Afterword" on Hemingway's grandparents. In a brief review it is not feasible to discuss each essay, so we shall content ourselves with comments on one from each category.

James Nagel, who served as editor of the collection, contributes a substantial discussion of Hemingway's parents in "John Halifax, Gentleman and the Literary Courtship of Clarence and Grace," building upon Mark Spilka's 1990 work, Hemingway's Quarrel with Androgyny. Nagel uses their love letters of the 1890s to document the literary bent of Hemingway's future parents, explaining their references to lames Lane Allen's A Kentucky Cardinal (1896) and Dinah Maria Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), noting that these novels confirmed "their wholesome Christian piety, their Protestant ethic in business and community life, and their romantic idealism." Further, "in the context of the love letters between his parents, the essential differences between Hemingway and his parents can be viewed as a conflict between their Victorian genteel morality and his Lost Generation ethical relativity."

Complementing Nagel's discussion of Hemingway's parents is an essay on his grandparents by Morris Buske, who documents the astonishingly parallel features of their background as well as the marked differences of the culture of each home. Their large, comfortable, similar houses sat facing each other across North Oak Park Avenue:

   Both [grandfathers] were of English ancestry, as were the wives to whom
   they were happily married, and ... both were pillars of the Oak Park
   community, active in their churches, upholders of traditional ethical
   values and standards of conduct, and both prospered in business....

Nevertheless, there were significant differences. Anson Hemingway, a strenuous Congregationalist, presided over a home of many restrictions with no interest in literature or the arts, but with a deep fascination for the sciences, especially astronomy and botany; Ernest Hall, a contented Episcopalian, cared little for science but filled his home with art, music, and literature. Hemingway and his fortunate siblings had constant access to both of these extraordinary households, which Buske sketches with admirable insight; one would hope for an even fuller treatment in the future.

Turning to Hemingway's juvenile writings, in "Out of the Wastebasket: Hemingway's High School Stories," David Marut analyzes three pieces Hemingway published in the school literary magazine, noting the presence of numerous features of style and content that recur in Hemingway's mature fiction. Not surprisingly, the literary influences are those of Rudyard Kipling, Ring Lardner, and Mark Twain, and here one already finds the tight plot and compact style, with use of local dialect and settings such as northern Michigan terrain and Chicago boxing gyms. Marut rightly questions whether Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Hemingway's newspaper work, often given credit for honing his sparse style, should yield credit "to the demanding standards of his Oak Park English teachers."

Surely the most startling of the collection's essays, however, is Judy Hen's fascinating reinterpretation of Hemingway's first novel in "`Working on the Farm': Hemingway's Work Ethic in "The Sun Also Rises." Starting with a careful reading of his early letters, written both as a boy and a young man, she establishes that "the ideal of work had been ingrained in Hemingway from the time of his childhood," and that "in Hemingway's mind the different shades of meaning encapsulated in the code word `work' apparently justified his existence as an artist." Next, she traces the effect of the work ethic in the pieces which make up In Our Time. Finally, she casts new light on The Sun Also Rises by viewing Jake Barnes as an example of "the Puritan-American work ethic.... [O]ne sees a workaholic observer who constantly casts a negative shadow on the playground and its games." Hen's is a new interpretation that deserves to be widely heard and widely debated.

The Oak Park Legacy is a useful contribution to Hemingway scholarship.

THOMAS K. MEIER Elmira College