WHILE recovering from his jaundice, Hemingway had come under the overall care of a Jim Gamble, a Red Cross captain, a wealthy man and a keen artist who became a friend and confidante and who is thought by some biographers to have fallen in love with Hemingway. Another, slightly different, account has Hemingway first meeting him when Gamble several months earlier.
Gamble, a captain and the Red Cross’s ‘Inspector of Rolling Canteens’, arrived at where the ambulance drivers were billeted and asked for volunteers to run stations handing out cigarettes and chocolate to Italian troops on the front. Hemingway, his friend Bill Horne and a third driver agreed. This was on July 1 and exactly a week later, just before midnight, Hemingway was blown up by an Austrian mortar.
Gamble certainly saw Hemingway in the Red Cross hospital, Milan, and he might have been the ‘homosexual visitor’ who arrived and at some point made a sexual proposition, which, Hemingway writes in A Moveable Feast, he turned down. That notwithstanding, when Gamble asked Hemingway to be his 
secretary and companion for a year in Europe with all expenses paid, Agnes von Kurowsky (right) urged him to turn the offer down and return to the United States.
Biographers suggest she now wanted to cool things with Hemingway and get him out of Europe, but she might also have suspected a homosexual aspect to Gamble’s offer of which the still unworldly, 19-year-old Hemingway was unaware.
He had already spent a week with Gamble at a rented villa in Taormina, Sicily, over Christmas, though when he returned to Milan he did not tell Agnes his break in Sicily had been with Gamble.
In fact, in conversation with his new friend ‘Chink’ Dorman-Smith, who knew he had gone to Sicily, he spun an odd story that he had seen nothing of Sicily because the woman who ran the hotel in which he had stayed had hidden his clothes to prevent him leaving and had kept him as some kind of sex slave.
That just might have been intended as an obscure joke, but that does not explain why he seemed to want to keep quiet about his time with Gamble in Sicily. How he explained it all to Agnes is not recorded.
Several months later, two weeks before Agnes wrote to him in Oak Park ending their romance, Hemingway had written to Gamble in Europe asking whether his offer was still open. By then Gamble was back in the US, but when the letter reached him in April, he invited Hemingway to stay with him in the upscale resort of Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania.
Hemingway did not take him up on the offer, but a few years later, now living in Chicago and courting Hadley Richardson, he again considered contacting Gamble with a view to taking up the offer. This time Hadley persuaded him not to do so.
. . .
Decommissioned, Hemingway sailed from Genoa on January 4 and arrived in New York two weeks later to a hero’s welcome and to be interviewed on the quayside by the New York Sun as ‘the first American to return home from the war in Europe’.
From Oak Park, he wrote to Agnes almost daily, but her letters to him became less and less frequent. Finally at the beginning of March Hemingway received her letter (which he admitted to a friend he had been dreading) calling off the marriage.
The tone of that ‘Dear John’ letter — she addressed him as ‘Ernest, dear boy’ and told him she was now engaged to an Italian officer — is cited by biographers as a good indication that she had not taken him or his marriage proposal as seriously as he did. Biographer Scott Donaldson even suggests that Agnes had accepted Hemingway’s marriage proposal both to keep him away from Jim Gamble and to get him off to the US sooner rather than later as by November 1918 she wanted to cool the relationship. Donaldson records that Agnes’ claim later in life that she was merely very fond of Hemingway and had been fond of a number of men does not square with the passionate nature of her early letters to him.
Her rejection hit him badly (but what rejection hasn’t badly hit many another 19-year-old boy or girl of all ages). He spent three days in bed and then simply lounged around at home, not getting up until noon. In and around Oak Park he was celebrated as a war hero, and the local Italian community organised two parties in his honour which were held at the Hemingway house (and the amount of wine they brought along and was consumed by guests in the teetotal Hemingway household did not go down well). He played up to the role, flamboyantly and incongruously wearing an Italian army uniform and a black cape, and doing nothing to correct the impression gained by many that he had actually fought on the Italian front.
An invitation from a former teacher at Oak Park High to give a talk about his experiences in Italy to the school debating society led to invitations for more such talks, and over the summer and autumn of 1919 he gave a series of public lectures in Oak Park and in communities around Walloon Lake, Michigan. At these lectures he exhibited the bloodstained trousers, complete with shrapnel holes, he had been wearing when he was blown up as well as the medal he had been awarded by the Italian government.
Her rejection hit him badly (but what rejection hasn’t badly hit many another 19-year-old boy or girl of all ages). He spent three days in bed and then simply lounged around at home, not getting up until noon. In and around Oak Park he was celebrated as a war hero, and the local Italian community organised two parties in his honour which were held at the Hemingway house (and the amount of wine they brought along and was consumed by guests in the teetotal Hemingway household did not go down well). He played up to the role, flamboyantly and incongruously wearing an Italian army uniform and a black cape, and doing nothing to correct the impression gained by many that he had actually fought on the Italian front.
An invitation from a former teacher at Oak Park High to give a talk about his experiences in Italy to the school debating society led to invitations for more such talks, and over the summer and autumn of 1919 he gave a series of public lectures in Oak Park and in communities around Walloon Lake, Michigan. At these lectures he exhibited the bloodstained trousers, complete with shrapnel holes, he had been wearing when he was blown up as well as the medal he had been awarded by the Italian government.
Some accounts claim he was awarded as many as four medals, but it has never been clear whether he received just the medal given to all Americans who had helped the Italian war effort and one for being wounded or, for whatever reason, two more. None, as later claimed and not denied by Hemingway, was presented to him by the king of Italy
In September his parents shut up the Windemere Cottage at Walloon Lake for the winter and returned to Oak Park and Hemingway lodged with a local family. When they, too, shut up their cottage, he rented a room in nearby Petoskey where he set about writing fiction on a borrowed typewriter and sending off stories to various magazines. None was accepted.
It was at one of his ‘my war’ lectures in Michigan that Hemingway was approached by a Mrs Harriet Connable, one of his mother’s friends, and hired by her and her husband Ralph (who ran the F. W. Woolworth chain in Canada) to act as a live-in paid companion and mentor for their disabled teenage son while they were in Florida on vacation.
In September his parents shut up the Windemere Cottage at Walloon Lake for the winter and returned to Oak Park and Hemingway lodged with a local family. When they, too, shut up their cottage, he rented a room in nearby Petoskey where he set about writing fiction on a borrowed typewriter and sending off stories to various magazines. None was accepted.
It was at one of his ‘my war’ lectures in Michigan that Hemingway was approached by a Mrs Harriet Connable, one of his mother’s friends, and hired by her and her husband Ralph (who ran the F. W. Woolworth chain in Canada) to act as a live-in paid companion and mentor for their disabled teenage son while they were in Florida on vacation.
In January 1920 he moved into their Toronto mansion, and before the Connables had left for Florida, he persuaded Ralph Connable, who knew various executives on the Toronto Star, to give him an introduction. He then took to hanging around the Star offices ‘hoping to be given an assignment’ and was eventually introduced to the Weekly Star’s editor, J. Herbert Cranston, who agreed to consider any freelance features he submitted for publication. In the six months he was in Toronto, he sold several short, chatty pieces to the paper and, crucially, Cranston took a shine to him.
When the Connables came home from Florida, they invited him to stay on as their house guest, and he didn’t return to Windemere Cottage at Walloon Lake until the beginning of June. He felt he was entitled to relax, spend time with his friends and go fishing, but his parents had other ideas and from letters they sent him throughout the summer it is clear there were arguments with his parents in which he became quite belligerent.
When the Connables came home from Florida, they invited him to stay on as their house guest, and he didn’t return to Windemere Cottage at Walloon Lake until the beginning of June. He felt he was entitled to relax, spend time with his friends and go fishing, but his parents had other ideas and from letters they sent him throughout the summer it is clear there were arguments with his parents in which he became quite belligerent.
Eventually, he and a friend moved into the guest annex at Windemere Cottage, but he still refused to find work, didn’t do the small tasks about the cottages he was required to do (including at his mother’s cottage on the other side of the lake) and simply continued his life of leisure, hunting and fishing. Throughout June and July things went from bad to worse, and finally in turn his parents, individually, asked him and his friend to move out and told him not to return until they had invited him back.
At the beginning of October, Hemingway began lodging in Chicago with Y K Smith, the older brother of his Michigan friends Bill and Katy Smith, and met Katy’s school friend Elizabeth Hadley Richardson when she came to stay for three weeks after the recent death of her mother (her father had shot himself 16 years earlier). They hit it off from the start, though their courtship from then until they married 11 months later, was largely conducted by letter. Hemingway also finally found a job: he had answered a small ad in the Chicago Tribune and was taken on by the Cooperative Commonwealth. It described itself as ‘The Weekly Magazine Of Mutual Help’ and was published by the Cooperative Society of America.
At the beginning of October, Hemingway began lodging in Chicago with Y K Smith, the older brother of his Michigan friends Bill and Katy Smith, and met Katy’s school friend Elizabeth Hadley Richardson when she came to stay for three weeks after the recent death of her mother (her father had shot himself 16 years earlier). They hit it off from the start, though their courtship from then until they married 11 months later, was largely conducted by letter. Hemingway also finally found a job: he had answered a small ad in the Chicago Tribune and was taken on by the Cooperative Commonwealth. It described itself as ‘The Weekly Magazine Of Mutual Help’ and was published by the Cooperative Society of America.
Hemingway claimed he was the magazine’s ‘managing editor’, but in fact he was just one of a number of young men churning out the necessary copy to give the magazine substance. Both the magazine and society were founded by a Harrison M Parker and were part of an elaborate scam by Parker. Hemingway later said he had realised as much by the following spring and resigned, but at least one biographer claims that despite seeing what was going on he stayed in his job until June when the magazine was wound up and Parker was taken to court, By which time $15 million (accounting for inflation $194 million in 2020) of the society’s money was in his wife’s bank account.
Although during their courtship Hemingway and Hadley saw each other only occasionally — in March 1921 Hemingway took her to Oak Park to introduced her to his parents and Hadley later commented that she and Grace were not made to be friends — they soon decided to marry. In June they began making practical plans for their wedding, but Hemingway then fell into a depression about it all and even — quite bizarrely — considered suicide. (The same happened several years later after Hadley and he were divorced, and he was on the point of marrying Pauline Pfeiffer.)
. . .
At the turn of the year, Jim Gamble had been back in touch and had again invited Hemingway to spend a year with him, all expenses paid, this time in Italy. Hemingway turned down the offer, but he and Hadley then adopted the idea of moving to Italy so he could do ‘his writing’. They later changed their minds about Italy and settled on moving to Paris at the recommendation of the writer Sherwood Anderson, a former ad man and a friend of Y K Smith’s who was accustomed to drop in. Impressed by the short stories Hemingway showed him, he insisted that Paris was where it was all happening in the arts and that the couple should move there, not Italy as they planned.
Hemingway and Hadley were married in the Methodist church in Horton Bay on September 3, 1921 — one biographer writes that Ed Hemingway was under the impression his son did not want him to attend the ceremony and had to be reassured by Hemingway — and spent their two-week honeymoon at the Walloon Park cottage. (Oddly during their honeymoon, Hemingway decided to introduce Hadley to all his previous girlfriends. She was not impressed.)
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| Hadley and Hemingway on their wedding day in Bay Township, Michigan, on September 3, 1921 |
Y K Smith had initially agreed they could live in his flat once they were married, but there had been a falling out between him and Hemingway after he told Y K that his wife, ‘Doodles’, was sleeping with another of the lodgers.
As it turned out Y K didn’t care as he and his wife had an ‘open’ marriage, and when the falling-out worsened, Y K rescinded his offer. The couple found a small apartment in Chicago and eventually set sail for Europe on December 20, 1920. To help Hemingway on his way, Sherwood Anderson provided him with letters of introduction to several friends and acquaintances in Paris informing them that the young man would be calling on them.
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