Robert K. Elder - Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park

Hidden Hemingway started as a newspaper articleor, more accurately, as a special issue of Oak Leaves, the longtime chronicle of news in Oak Park, which Ernest Hemingway delivered as a teen.

In 2014, I was the editor in chief of a newspaper chain that included Oak Leaves. I wanted to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I and write about Hemingway, the villages most famous casualty of that war. I had moved to Oak Park from Chicago with my family in 2007, had heard all the Hemingway stories, and had visited the museum and his birthplace, both on Oak Park Avenue.

The special issue of Oak Leaves also gave me the opportunity to explore the Hemingway legacy and debunk the wide lawns myth: Hemingway never said or wrote that his hometown was a place of wide lawns and narrow minds.

In addition, it gave me the chance to spend time with Barbara Ballinger, a legendary local librarian and longtime board member of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, whose collection was housed in the third floor of the Oak Park Public Library. Over a couple of afternoons, we sifted through Hemingways family photos and teen notebooks, read the Dear John letter from his World War I love, Agnes von Kurowsky, and even examined a dental X-ray.

When the Oak Leaves special issue came out that July, the foundation hosted a series of events celebrating the authors 115th birthday and the release of a second volume of his letters by Cambridge University Press. Penn State Universitys Sandra Spanier, the editor of the series, spoke to a capacity crowd about Hemingways letters, his almost pathological love of correspondence, and his pack-rat tendencies. Hemingway, she told us, saved every scrap of paper he ever touched.

Had I not already gone through the Hemingway archives in Oak Park, I would have thought this a hyperbolic statement, but if anything, Spanier was downplaying the amount of material saved not only by Hemingway, but by his siblings and parents as well. Since starting this book, my collaborators and I have debatedlightheartedlyif it was sentimentality or a hoarding instinct that led the Hemingways to document their family history so meticulously: to save news clippings, birthday cards, lists, sheet music, and childhood books.

Clarence Ed Hemingway always encouraged his children to keep account books, and Grace compiled voluminous scrapbooks, so its easy to trace the instinct. Their childrenespecially Ernest and his sister Marcellinewere constantly adding to an empire of letters, photographs, receipts, and trinkets that seem to carry memories stronger than any blessing or curse.

That July, I approached John W. Berry, the chairman of the Oak Park foundation. It was a hot day during the Running of the Bulls eventspart of the foundations yearly Hemingway celebrationsat which my six-year-old twins, and hordes of children like them, ran around the park in boxes decorated to look like bulls. I asked John if he had ever been approached about allowing a book to be done on the archives. He hadnt. And it was too hot outside to discuss the idea. John was wearing a red scarf around his neck, handing out balloons and plastic bull key rings to kids. He needed time to think about it.

Within a few weeks, however, it was announced that the Hemingway Society had chosen Oak Park to host its seventeenth biennial International Hemingway Conference. A book celebrating Oak Park, the collection, and the villages most famous author seemed like serendipity.

For Hemingway the writer, of course, all the material he saved was not only biography but also research. He was gathering data and details that made the life lived in his books more real, tangible.

We have endeavored to do the same in this book, to tell a life story through objects, ephemera, and photos that will illuminate Hemingways history. Some of what we found contradicts the public image he built for himself; some of it supports his larger-than-life myth. We hope that, in total, the book and the material we drew on makes Hemingway more human and also provides scholarly insight into his work.

The items in this volume are more than stage dressing for a literary life, more than marginalia. They provide definition, and in some cases, documentation of Hemingways ambition and heartbreak, literary triumphs and trials, joys and tragedies. It is Hemingways stature as a Pulitzer and Nobel Prizewinning author that has drawn so many biographers and historians to his work. But it is also the wealth of material that he left behind that makes him such a compelling, engaging, and often infuriating research subject.

Lastly, a note on the word archives, as used in the title of this book. It is very much intended to mean archives in the plural. The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park is the steward of the largest collection in the authors hometown, which is itself comprised of many different collections, most notably the family archive of Marcelline Hemingway Sanford and items from private collectors such as Waring Jones (19272008). The Oak Park and River Forest Historical Society and the Oak Park Public Library are also treasure troves of Hemingway material, some of which we share in this volume.

For years, Hemingway scholars such as Carlos Baker, Jeffrey Meyers, Michael Reynolds, and Paul Hendrickson have used these hometown archives for their deeply researched biographies. Even Michael Palin, a Monty Python alum, visited the archives for his TV series (and eventual book), Michael Palins Hemingway Adventure. As researchers ourselves, were indebted to all those who have chronicled Hemingways life and work in such detail.

Now, for the first time, my coauthors and I are offering the same intimate experiences we had with the Hemingway collections to the publicwithout the searching through boxes and wading through folders. Not that this is a complete document of the treasures to be found in Oak Park. Not by a long shot. Theres still more to be catalogued, more to be found. We hope this book serves as a primer for all future Hemingway admirers and scholars who hope to meet the author in his hometown through the archives he left behind.