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Posted on Thu, Sep. 27, 2007 11:35 AM
Preparing for War and Writing
Reading the Young Hemingway's Kansas City Star, 1917-18
More News
By STEVE PAUL The Kansas City Star
This article is reprinted from The Hemingway Review, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Spring 2004). Copyright 2004 The Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Used by permission. For information about The Hemingway Society and Foundation, see its Web site: www.hemingwaysociety.org/.
INTRODUCTION
On a fast track to manhood and making his way in the world, Ernest Hemingway began working at The Kansas City Star in the middle of October 1917. The United States had begun training troops for the brutal war under way in Europe. Ernest might rather have stayed in Chicago, but the newspapers there weren't hiring. Hemingway's uncle in Kansas City knew some higher-ups at The Star and that connection led to Ernest's hiring as a cub reporter (Fenton 29, Baker 32, Sanford 150). He was eighteen, and just out of high school, but what he lacked in experience he made up for in enthusiasm.
Biographers and essayists have long distilled Hemingway's Kansas City apprenticeship into two basic story lines: It was an exciting, productive time for the budding writer, and he sure got a lot of mileage out of the newsroom writing rules he was made to follow (“Use short sentences”). This paper, however, will look at Hemingway's Kansas City experience differently from most of those previous accounts. It will examine Hemingway's likely newspaper reading in the months before he joined the ambulance corps in Italy. It will suggest that the feature stories and news of the day helped to prepare him for the war and, in perhaps only subtle and ineffable ways, for writing as well.
Day in and day out, in The Star's morning and afternoon editions, he read items about the local war-bond drive and dispatches from the European fronts. War news consumed much of the Page 1 acreage and a good amount of space inside. Almost every edition of the paper carried a one-column picture of a local enlistee headed for service overseas.
In Hemingway's very first week as a journalist,[1] he was met with headlines such as “Peace Is Far Off” and “Army Is Training Experts.” The latter story was a dispatch from American Field Headquarters in France about a new training camp meant to turn young lieutenants into captains. “The flower of American young manhood,” it began, “was brought together in a temporary camp today, training to become officers of America's first contingent” (Kansas City Star, 22 Oct. 1917, 2). One day the paper offered a collage of pictures showing trainees as they learned to dig trenches and throw bombs – “two of the most important things to know in the style of fighting to which the American troops will devote themselves” (“American Troops Training in France,” 17 Oct. 1917, 10). For Hemingway, trenches and bombs – the physical realities of war – were still more than eight months in the future. But his education about war from one of the nation's great newspapers had already begun. His literary education continued as well. The newspaper carried long excerpts from books of the day. Its literary department was a magnet for avid readers and writers in the newsroom (Fenton, 37-38). Hemingway might have caught this wry observation in an editorial column one day: “Fiction is where you read about the woman who returns his letters unopened” (Kansas City Star, 22 Oct. 1917, 14).
The young Hemingway's first newspaper published a series of long dispatches from the French and Italian fronts. Written by Burris A. Jenkins, several of these thoughtful accounts ran during Hemingway's first week on The Star's staff. That very week, Jenkins, a Kansas City minister and civic leader, also began a series of public lectures on his travels in Europe, talking about the action on three fronts and his encounters with British, French, American and Italian soldiers (“Dr. Jenkins Home Today,” Kansas City Star 14 Oct. 1917, 1). Hemingway could have attended those lectures after his day in the newsroom was over.
Before his first week in Kansas City had ended, he might also have been attracted by “Angel of the Marne Here,” a feature story published in The Star, complete with a two-column line drawing, about a European nurse, the Countess Mazzuchi. In America on a fund-raising tour, she headed the war hospitals in Italy, and had tales to tell of courage, adventure, danger, and healing. In retrospect, that story could have offered Hemingway a glimpse into his own future. It was only nine months later when he landed in a Red Cross hospital in Italy, tended by a nurse who would break his heart.
Within days came a turn in the war that eventually would become of utmost interest to Hemingway. The first headline, on 24 October 1917, was ominous: “Striking at Italy.” The next morning brought more details in a brief story. German troops were massing in support of the Austrians from Monte Rombon to the Bainsizza Plateau (“Plan Big Drive on Italy,” Kansas City Times, 25 Oct. 1917, 3). By the afternoon edition, the situation became worse: “Break Italian Line” (Kansas City Star, 25 Oct. 1917, 1). And over the next few days the stories detailed how the Italian army was under siege and fleeing its positions on the Isonzo front. More than ten years later, Hemingway would revisit the action of those very days as he researched and wrote his Italian novel, A Farewell to Arms.
Posted on Thu, Sep. 27, 2007 11:35 AM
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