LITERARY LIVES
Oak Park's pride
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Though Hemingway rejected his birthplace, Oak Park the town still fondly remembers its famous son, discovers KAUSALYA SANTHANAM.
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Forgive and celebrate: The Hemingway museum. Photo: R. Santhanam
OAK PARK is an upper middle class suburb in Chicago. Rows of neat houses stand in these serene boulevards. Among them are the ones in which Ernest Hemingway was born and grew up, and a building that houses a museum dedicated to the writer. When we drive into the area, we find ourselves greeted by festivities on the village green. The Hemingway de Fiesta is going on. This is an annual event, when Oak Park welcomes visitors and treats them to the sights free for a day. Oak Park has plenty to celebrate, for, it was here that the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright also lived; his elegant studio is also a museum now.
Comprehensive collection
At the Hemingway museum, there is every conceivable information on the writer, beginning from the squiggles that he drew as a child of two. Carefully preserved, they bear captions given by his mother, an opera singer. "Giraffe", says a two-line masterpiece, "Sailing in the Ocean", says another, perhaps in prescience of the prize-winning works to come. Hemingway, the son of a doctor, began writing while in school — his childhood diary and high school grades are also displayed.
The museum has a number of beautiful and rare photographs of Hemingway — tall, athletic and handsome — looking more like a sportsman than a writer whose career was crowned with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, the year following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. If Santiago, the elderly protagonist of the novel is a moving figure whose love for the sea is matched only by his will to challenge the forces of nature and triumph, many of Hemingway's other heroes too are fighters — literally. Some of them are soldiers, very much like Hemingway himself who enrolled when he was only 18 and was posted to Italy where he did ambulance duty in World War I. Wounded, he returned home to a hero's welcome. Oak Park saluted him as it did many other of its young men who distinguished themselves in the War. It was while recuperating at a hospital in Italy that Hemingway fell in love with his nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky. He was heartbroken when she, older to him by seven years, broke off the affair. "You acted like a spoilt child", she says in the famous letter which has been put up at the museum. Hemingway left Oak Park in 1920 — never to return.
Lucky city
Hemingway, who had become a journalist before the war, married Elisabeth Hadley, and went to report on the war in Greece and Turkey. Paris, which he visited in 1921, turned out to be a lucky city for him. Excellent black and white photographs capture these times in his life. His sojourn brought him in contact with many writers — Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald. But the friendships soured. His first serious novel Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises was published in Paris. It was in Paris too that he fell in love with a fashion editor, the elegant Pauline Pfeiffer, whom he married after divorcing Elisabeth.
Hemingway revelled in his role as a war correspondent. War and the place of a human being in a world beset by strife and turmoil were the themes of his successful novels. And these were many, written in his much admired and inimitable prose style. His eventful life provided much material for his art. Like the titles of the works of playwright Tennessee Williams, those of Hemingway's books too are evocative: A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Across the River and into the Trees, To Have and Have Not, Winner Take Nothing, True at First Light... Reporting on the war brought him and correspondent Martha Gellhorn together. The pictures of him and Martha, whom he soon married, show a couple apparently on the same wavelength. But the marriage broke up. The writer moved to Cuba in 1940 and later, back to the United States. The constant drinking had weakened him steadily and he succumbed to the depression he was prone to. The writer shot himself in July 1961. In a few days time, he would have turned 62.
Another side
Hemingway was a keen sportsman but he was fond of blood sports. His safaris in Africa are captured in striking pictures. The story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" arose from his safari experience. He was a fan of Spanish bullfights and this inspired Death in the Afternoon. A corner of the museum is filled with posters of the many films made with famous stars — Gregory Peck, Ingrid Bergman, Ava Gardner, Rock Hudson, Gary Cooper — based on Hemingway's books. The shop at the entrance has a wonderful selection of books by the writer and on him, including one by his granddaughter, actor Mariel Hemingway.
On the same street, a few houses away is the birthplace of Hemingway. The guide leads us through the restored rooms of the building which looks as if a wand has been waved so that it is stupefied in Victorian times. The most interesting aspect is that a novelist, William Elliott Hazelgrove, has obtained permission to use the attic of the house to work in during weekends. He has left a pile of cards on a tray for visitors. We pick one up and it says quaintly, "Writer in residence, Hemingway's Attic".
Hemingway rejected Oak Park. "Great green lawns and narrow minds", is how he famously described it. But this serene lovely suburb is more than forgiving. It celebrates the writer with gusto and Hemingway is upheld with pride as Oak Park's very own.
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