The writer, the journalist, the insider, the expert

EACH of these essays/entries is intended to stand alone, so there is a certain degree of duplication in them as it is unlikely they will be read in sequence or even that all will be read by a visitor to these pages. This is intentional: someone reading an essay/entry must not be puzzled by some allusion she or he might not understand because they have not read the other essays/entries.

List of posts

In 1923, under the energetic leadership of [Harry C] Hindmarsh’s father-in-law, the late Joseph E Atkinson, the Star was emerging as the colossus of Canadian journalism. Sensational headlines, red type, comic strips, eyewitness and flamboyant reportage, basic English and many photographs were the fundamental tools. In the bible-belt atmosphere of southern Ontario the Star’s management also uncovered in religion an appeal which Hearst, for example, although he frequently attempted it, was never able to exploit fully in the United States. Atkinson’s nickname in the trade an indication of the pious hypocrisy his contemporaries felt they detected in the contradictory components of his papers. They called him Holy Joe.’

Charles A Fenton, The Apprenticeship


Of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years.

There wasn’t room in his head for cops and robbers, a six-day week, and serious writing. Even to his journalism he brought standards that were personally exacting. ‘Don’t talk about it before you write it,’ he warned Mary Lowry once, as they walked back to the Star after a provocative interview with the survivors of a Japanese earthquake. ‘You mustn’t talk about it,’ Hemingway insisted. ‘You’ll spoil it.’

Charles A Fenton, The Apprenticeship


Of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

Ernest Hemingway.

LIKE many writers, Hemingway began working with words as a journalist, and many young journalists shared and share his ambition to ‘become a writer’. Some make it, many do not. Although he later insisted that his journalism was ruining his writing and ended his first stint of working as a journalist when he returned to Paris in January 1924, he resumed journalism in the early 1930s when he was invited to contribute ‘Letters’ on any topic he chose for the then new magazine Esquire and carried on turning out pieces for magazines intermittently for the next 15 years.

Despite his advice to young writers to give up journalism because it would ruin their writing, a great many writers have pursued a career as both a writer and a journalist with neither ruining the other. It doesn’t help, of course, that the notions of ‘journalism’ and ‘journalist’ are hopelessly vague. A copy editor (‘sub-editor’ in Britain and some parts of the English-speaking world) trimming copy and writing headlines and captions for an angling magazine is as much ‘a journalist’ as the hard news man or woman reporting from a war zone or sniffing out skullduggery in high places,.

When Hemingway decided to ‘become a writer’ is not recorded, but by his late teenage years and especially after he returned from Italy in 1918, he was writing stories and submitting them to magazines. His biographers say the works were wholly conventional and imitative of his favourite authors, and none demonstrated any unusual gift. His literary ambitions were and are certainly not unusual among men and women in their late teens and early 20s, although most fall by the wayside. Cyril Connolly observed that

There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall

but he might well have said the same thing about early ambitions. That Hemingway was later able to ignore that pram in the hall and persevere with his writing after the birth of his first child, John, in October 1923, was down his then wife Hadley’s staunch support — and her trust fund income — as much as his ruthless single-mindedness and a marked self-centredness.

. . .

Hemingway’s progress as a writer, from turning out the juvenilia he submitted to the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines to the triumph of his first published works a few years later has been detailed by the former Duke University English professor, Charles A Fenton.

In his book The Apprenticeship Of Ernest Hemingway, Fenton outlines Hemingway’s development as a writer, from his first acquaintance with English literature at Oak Park High and the stories he wrote for class, to his, albeit short, training as a reporter on the Kansas City Star and his association with the Toronto Star Weekly and its sister morning paper, the Toronto Star.

In the course of his research, Fenton remained undeterred by Hemingway’s warnings, issued when ‘Papa’ got wind of the project in 1950, not to approach his family and those who had known him for information. Hemingway’s attitude was, though, like much in his personality, ambiguous. We are obliged to accept his continued insistence that he did not want his biography written and that the only important thing about a writer is the work he produced.

Yet his claim in several letters to Fenton demanding that he abandon his research because it was ‘an invasion of privacy’ is odd. James Mellow tellingly points out in his biography that even while Hemingway said he did not want any kind of biographical work written about him, he was already passing on ‘facts’ about his early life. Mellow comments

When Fenton also began querying his sister Marceline and his outlawed sister Carol (she had married he college boyfriend John Garner in 1933, against Hemingway’s wishes and he vowed never to see her again), Hemingway gave him a ‘cease and desist’ order . . . The correspondence developed into angry exchanges. Yet, with each angry response, Hemingway, by way of correcting errors, also began feeding out more tempting bait . . . it was to Fenton that he gratuitously offered the dubious information that he had had to get the hell out of Petoskey because of troubles with four or five girls.

Some of his later biographers list by name the three or four girls Hemingway dallied with in northern Michigan, but none reports what would have been the interesting ‘fact’ that, presumably as some kind of local Don Juan, Hemingway was forced to skip town.

It is more likely that despite ostensibly ‘correcting’ factual errors, Hemingway was again trying to contribute to the legend he had created for himself, this time stressing that he had been a womaniser even at an early age. Hemingway’s apparent reluctance to have his life examined is also somewhat contradicted by his continual self-promotion over the previous 20 years, described by John Raeburn in his book Fame Became Him, in his journalism for Esquire and other magazines.

. . .

In tracing Hemingway’s development as a writer, Fenton interviewed a great many from his early life. He spoke to Oak Park High friends, contemporaries and staff, fellow reporters and executives at the Kansas City Star who had worked there in 1917 and 1918, to executives and colleagues on the Toronto Star and Star Weekly and friends, and to acquaintances and fellow journalists in Paris.

Fenton tells us, unremarkably given the overall tone of his account, that many were even then sure the young man would go on to achieve great things, and certainly by the late 1940s and early 1950s it was natural for Fenton and others to treat Hemingway as ‘a great writer’.

Yet this almost universal intuition of 30 years earlier about the young man’s future — reported, notably, once he was famous — highlights a central criticism of Fenton’s book: it often reads rather too much like those ‘lives of the saints’ written for young children in which as a youngster the saint in question is preternaturally virtuous and an eventual canonisation is seen as inevitable.

Fenton is also sometimes at odds with later biographers on some of the facts of Hemingway’s life, although it is now almost impossible to discover whether he or the later biographers — whose accounts also often vary — were at fault.

As evidence of Hemingway’s literary gift, Fenton cites that the stories Hemingway produced for his Oak Park High English classes were read out as examples for his classmates to emulate, and that he was active on both The Tabula, the school’s literary magazine, and edited The Trapeze, its newspaper. It would be instructive to know who else was asked to read out their classwork and who else worked on The Tabula and at the time served as one of — the six — Trapeze editors.

Later, once Hemingway had arrived in Kansas City in October 1917 to train as a reporter on the Star, he was said to have been enthusiastic, eager to learn, volunteered for extra duties and to have talked incessantly about journalism and writing; but assuming working for a newspaper has been a long-held

ambition for a 17-year-old ‘breaking into journalism’ — it’s odd how no one seems to ‘break into banking’ or to ‘break into teaching’ — which of them isn’t eager and enthusiastic? And given that reputedly many journalists are said to harbour ambitions to ‘become a writer’ (and many succeed), Hemingway and his ambition were not unusual.

When he joined the Kansas City Star, Hemingway was, like all cub reporters, given a copy of the paper’s style sheet, which outlined all the rules the paper wanted its news staff to observe. It began

Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English

and Hemingway later declared they were the

best rules I ever learned for the business of writing.

Certainly in his first two volumes of short stories and his first two novels (published between 1925 and 1929) Hemingway observed those rules strictly, and in one review of In Our Time, his first volume, they earned him the plaudits that his language is fibrous and athletic, colloquial and fresh, hard and clean

and that

his very prose seems to have an organic being of its own.

A year later the New York Times review of The Sun Also Rises proclaimed that the novel had been written in

lean, hard and athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame

(though quite why ‘more literary’ English should feel shamed is not clear). The Kansas City Star was itself also impressed by his first novel and observed in its review that their former cub reporter wrote

with a swinging, effortless precision that puts him in the first flight of American stylists.

Oddly, though, Hemingway seems to have forgotten those Kansas City Star strictures entirely when just seven years after his first volume of short stories appeared and six years after his first novel was published he produced Death In The Afternoon, his guidebook to bullfighting and, ironically, writing. In a review in September 1932 of Death In The Afternoon the New York Times observed that

In this book Mr. Hemingway is guilty of the grievous sin of writing sentences which have to be read two or three times before the meaning is clear. He enters, indeed, into a stylistic phase which corresponds, for his method, to the later stages of Henry James.

It got no better when three years later he published Green Hills Of Africa, his account of his East Africa safari and, again ironically, his considered dicta on literature and writing. In 1939, the critic Edmund Wilson, who a decade earlier had been a staunch Hemingway champion but who had since revised his views with each new book the writer published, said

[Hemingway] has produced what must be one of the only books ever written which make Africa and it’s animals seem dull. Almost the only thing we learned about the animals is that Hemingway wants to kill them. And as for the natives . . . the principal impression we get of them is that they were simple and inferior people who enormously admired Hemingway.

As Hemingway would — or should — have known, ‘being dull’ is a cardinal sin in journalism. As for the prose in Green Hills Of Africa, Hemingway also comprehensively ignored those sacred Kansas City style sheet rules, and Edmund Wilson also records that in the book

He delivers a self-confident lecture on the high possibilities of prose writing, with the implication that he himself, Hemingway, has realized or hopes to realise these possibilities; and then writes what are certainly, from the point of view of prose, the very worst pages of his life. There is one passage which is hardly even intelligible — the most serious possible fault for a writer who is always insisting on the supreme importance of lucidity.

In a contemporary review of Green Hills Of Africa for the Saturday Review of Literature, Bernard de Voto also concerns himself with the lack of lucidity in Hemingway’s prose and writes

The prize sentence in the book runs [to] forty-six lines. The one I should like to quote as typical . . . though less than half that long, is still too long, and a comparatively straightforward one must serve. ‘Going downhill steeply made these Spanish shooting boots short in the toe and there was an old argument, about this length of boot and whether the boot-maker, whose part I had taken, unwittingly, first, only as interpreter, and finally embraced his theory patriotically as a whole and, I believed, by logic, had overcome it by adding onto the heel.’ This is simpler than most, but it shows the new phase . . . But, however earnest the intention, the result is a kind of etymological gas that is just bad writing.

One obvious question is: did Hemingway not re-read what he had written? If not, why not? In 1936 in one of his Esquire ‘Letters’ he advised would-be writers

The best way is to read [what you have previously written] all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can’t do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That’s how you make it all of one piece.

Had he re-read the passage quoted by de Voto, he would certainly have realised it was in dire need of re-writing and re-phrasing. All-in-all Hemingway seems also to have forgotten his own dictum that

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

. . .

At the end of April 1918, Hemingway left the Star after just seven months for service in Italy as a Red Cross ambulance driver. He was almost killed the following July (after just four weeks in Italy) and spent the next five months in hospital, and his experiences produced much potential material for several short stories and notably his novel A Farewell To Arms.

He was back in the US by mid-January, and after spending the summer with his family at their holiday cottage on Lake Walloon in northern Michigan, he remained in the area when the cottage was shut for the season. It seems he then began writing in earnest. He rented a room in nearby Petoskey and spent his time on his typewriter producing more fiction to try to sell to magazines (and, according to his ‘revelation’ to Fenton, getting local girls into trouble).

By the beginning of 1920 (not, as Fenton reports, by the end of 1919) he was in Toronto to spend a month with the family of a wealthy businessman as the companion and mentor of a disabled son and was invited to extend his stay.

It was through the businessman that he made contact with the Toronto Star Weekly whose editor, Herbert Cranston, agreed to consider for publication any features he produced. Yet the Toronto Star and the Star Weekly, and the Kansas City Star were like chalk and cheese. Fenton writes:

In Kansas City Hemingway had worked under conscientious editors who took with the greatest seriousness their responsibilities to the profession in general and to young reporters in particular. . . Hemingway had been indoctrinated in the necessities of accuracy, in the obligations of vigorous prose, and the requirements of forceful narrative. It had been a school with high, harsh standards, rigidly enforced. Few such standards existed on either of the Toronto papers owned by the late Joseph E Atkinson . . . The Star Weekly was in particular dedicated largely to the indiscriminate entertainment of its subscribers.

The Star’s imperative of entertaining rather than informing its readers was reflected in the paper’s layout and visual impact. Fenton adds that

Sensational headlines, red type, comic strips, eyewitness and flamboyant reportage, basic English and many photographs were [its] fundamental tools.

The Star needed a lot of copy week-in, week-out and, says Fenton

More important, from Hemingway’s point of view, the Star Weekly emphasised feature material on a virtually limitless range of topics . . . and bought most of its material, in 1920, from freelance writers.

Any and all writing, irrespective of its purpose, which demands a certain discipline is good training for a would-be writer, whether he or she hopes eventually to produce high art, low art or even, as Hemingway boasted of The Sun Also Rises, something in between.

It increases a familiarity with words, their varied use, their sound, meanings and ‘import’. So whether Hemingway was writing short, accurate and succinct news reports for the Kansas City Star or fluffy and disposable colour copy for the Start was neither here nor there: he was writing.

None Hemingway’s Kansas City Star output seems to have survived — why would two-paragraph stories on local street accidents or such be preserved? But some of the short colour pieces Hemingway produced in Toronto (and later in Paris) for the Star Weekly have been and can be read on a Toronto Star website dedicated to the paper’s connection with the writer. Fenton’s analysis of this work is thorough and honest: he admits that although some of the pieces Hemingway produced were quite good, much else was workaday.

The last, though, should not necessarily be regarded as criticism: Hemingway was not paid by the Star to produce literature, but to help turn out the reams of copy it needed to fill the pages of the morning paper and its weekly stablemate.

Those short pieces demonstrate that Hemingway had a neat turn of phrase, a colourful style and an easy gift for producing such fluff, though such a facility is not unusual among working journalists. What also stands out is a certain sardonic take Hemingway had on most things, although that, too, is not unusual in a young man in his late teens.

. . .

By the summer Hemingway was back with his family at the Walloon Lake cottage, arguing with his parents a great deal and doing little except fishing with a friend from the Kansas City Star who had also served with the Red Cross and who was staying. They ignored his mother’s requests to do small chores around that house, and finally his mother kicked them out.

Hemingway moved into Chicago where he found more writing work, this time producing and editing copy for a monthly newspaper called the Cooperative Commonwealth (intended purely to drum up subscribers to a scam outfit called the Cooperative Society of America run by a crook called Harrison Parker). Hemingway, who later claimed he was the paper’s ‘managing editor’, was worked hard work, but yet again the discipline of churning out copy by the yard was good training.

He lodged with the brother of friends from northern Michigan, a man who worked in advertising and who introduced him to a former colleague, the writer Sherwood Anderson. Anderson, then riding high in literary circles, liked the fiction Hemingway showed him, and when Hemingway told him he and his soon-to-be wife Hadley Richardson were planning on moving to Naples where he would write, Anderson persuaded him instead to move to Paris and promised to supply him with letters of introduction to Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. It is not recorded whether or not at the time Hemingway knew who Stein and Pound were.

Hemingway and Hadley married in September 1921, and by late-December were in Paris, where within days Hemingway was filing copy to the Star: his first impressions of Europe (he and Hadley had travelled to Paris via Spain), the life of a freelance, his impressions of the ‘bohemian’ Montparnasse where he and Hadley settled (whose cafes, he told the Star Weekly’s Ontario readers, were filled with men and women posing as ‘artists’, whereas true artists like himself simply got on with it) and café life. It was the kind of timeless, inconsequential colour copy the Star Weekly wanted.

. . .

When Hemingway is spoken of, almost in awe and certainly with respect, as ‘the youngest foreign correspondent in Paris at the time’, it is useful to bear in mind that he was not working as a hard news reporter. His arrangement with the Star Weekly (and, in time, with the daily Star) was on the same freelance basis as it had been in Toronto.

In Paris he was ‘a stringer’, a journalist on call and only paid if what he supplied was published. Even when, come April 1922, the Star asked him to attend the Genoa economic conference (and much later in the year the Lausanne peace conference), they wanted their usual colour pieces not news reports. These they obtained from the wire services.

In fact, his trip to Constantinople, Smyrna and Thrace in the autumn of 1922 to provide more colour pieces had been at his own suggestion. It was the excitement of the war he craved (though working trips away from Paris also paid better freelance rates, as well as $75 in expenses).

Hemingway was a gregarious man and was soon socialising with other Paris-based journalists from whom he picked up a great deal, not least snippets of political analysis which he was able to use in the pieces he filed for the Star. One useful journalistic talent he mastered and employed in those pieces was to appear well-informed. The role of ‘the insider’, of the man ‘who knows’, the man who had (in his own phrase) ‘the gen’ was one he espoused with enthusiasm.

A few years later he developed this skill for the ‘Letters’ he wrote for Arnold Gingrich’s then new magazine Esquire, and very soon became ‘an expert’ — and was swiftly accepted as such by his readers — in all kinds of areas: fishing, hunting, wine, fine dining and where to eat, etiquette, travelling, art and, of course, writing — it was a persona that, as John Raeburn demonstrates in Fame Became Him, contributed greatly to the ‘public Ernest Hemingway’.

. . .

In parallel to his life as a freelance journalist in Paris, Hemingway had followed up two of the letters of introduction Sherwood Anderson had supplied and contacted Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. He showed them the fiction he had so far written, and both took it on themselves to help him develop a modernist style.

This, as far as Hemingway was concerned, was the kind of writing he wanted to produce. Unfortunately, almost all of that work and anything he had produced before and since arriving in Paris was lost when a small valise his wife has using was stolen from a train in the Gare de Lyon. Just two stories, which were not in the valise, survived.

In those 22 months in Paris, the Star asked Hemingway to go on several trips for them to produce copy, but his heart was not in journalism which he was convinced was ruining his writing, and he turned down some of them (which would have been impossible had he been on staff).

When Hadley discovered she was pregnant, however, and Hemingway faced the prospect of providing for a family, he finally took up the daily Star’s offer of a staff job in Toronto, and he and his wife sailed to Canada in September 1923.

Hemingway was worked hard in Toronto and got none of his own writing done. Harry C Hindmarsh, the deputy managing editor, who happened to be married to the daughter of the Star group’s owner, Joseph Atkinson, (both pictured left) thought him to be a cocky show-off.

Most recent biographers state that Hemingway did overdo the ‘veteran’ journalist who had ‘covered war’ and who was to boot ‘a published author’ — because of his two slim volumes of poetry and short stories that had been privately published earlier in the year — and Hindmarsh set about taking Hemingway down a peg or two.

It didn’t help that Hindmarsh was also at odds with his immediate boss, the managing editor John Bone who had taken Hemingway on full-time as a news reporter. Within weeks Hemingway had fallen out with Hindmarsh and was de facto demoted to working full-time on the weekly Star where he was back to turning out the fluffy inconsequential colour pieces it needed.

By Christmas he had had enough and handed in his resignation, and that was the end of his association with the Star papers and regular journalism. Before the end of January he, Hadley and their newborn son, John, were back in Paris where Hemingway intended to dedicate himself to writing full-time.

. . .

Now without an income of his own from Star freelance work, Hemingway, Hadley and their young son had to exist on the money Hadley’s trust fund paid out. Money was tighter than it was before the brief sojourn in Toronto, but Hemingway did not look for paid employment. He did work part-time on Ford Madox Ford’s short-lived literary magazine transatlantic review (the title was all in lower case) and Ernest Walsh’s This Quarter, but it was not paid work. But at least he could now dedicate himself to writing fiction with no distractions.

In Paris, Hemingway was continually assuring friends how hard he was engaged on ‘difficult’ work and was writing every day whenever possible, whether in cafes, at home or in a garret room he later claimed

he had rented nearby. But a frank assessment of how much he produced in 21 months — between the beginning of December 1922 when the valise was stolen until October 1924 when he dispatched the manuscript for his first commercially produced book, In Our Time, to his New York publisher, Boni & Liveright — indicates it was not a great deal.

The manuscript included the three stories and the 18 very brief vignettes (which he called chapters) from his first two privately published works and 13 new stories. Of these new stories, the two-part story Big Two-Hearted River, at just over 8,000 words, was by far the longest in the collection. The others, at between 500 and 2,500 words were shorter.

In Our Time attracted attention and impressed many in literary circles, not least because of its startlingly different subject matter and style, but it did not sell well. It had an initial print run of just 1,300 copies, and Hemingway (who thought he knew best about on most matters, in this case publishing) told Boni & Liveright they should have printed at least 20,000 copies and claimed that the poor sales were down to inadequate advertising by the publisher. But at least Hemingway could now claim to be a professional writer.

His life as working journalist was over and his life as ‘writer’ was now beginning. Although several years later he contributed his ‘Letters’ to Gingrich’s Esquire, he was by then not a hack hired to supply reams of inconsequential copy, but an established and increasingly famous author whose thoughts and opinions might interest readers. There was a world of difference.