The Never-Ending Research Trail Takes Us Back to Hemingway's Youth

Found in a used bookstore today: this biographical novel—Hemingsteen, by Michael Murphy, published in 1977. It even boasts a blurb from the biographer Carlos Baker. I’d never heard of it, never seen it, but now with I had. Having only now just cracked it open and read the first chapter, the book has something going for it. The author does a bang-up job of getting inside the young man’s head and it seems as if the novel butts right up against my book, Hemingway at Eighteen. It seems to be imagining the young man on the verge of something bigger, something like the life of a writer that will soon come his way.

If nothing else, given its status as fiction, I still would not have hesitated to quote this one passage from the first chapter. In this moment the character, just having graduated from high school, is lying in bed thinking about his future. He remembers some of the stories he wrote for the school’s literary journal:

They were splendid stories at the time that they were written, now they were not so splendid, nor was hunting with his father, talking with his mother, playing with his sister and his little brother, hiking with his friends, nor football, track, and swimming, and the boys and all the girls. Nothing, or almost nothing, that had been any good was any longer any good. Nor right and propoer for the thing for which he yearned.

Marvelous, I say, as the boy turns eighteen.

A Research Tip, a Mystery, and Nearly 20 Years Later, a Resolution

In gathering material for a forthcoming Hemingway project, I took another look at a post-script to Hemingway at Eighteen. This article first appeared in the Kansas City Star on October 1, 2017, under the headline “On the trail of a Hemingway mystery in KC.” I’ve made some small, largely inconsequential edits here.

By Steve Paul

            At the end of my book Hemingway at Eighteen I recount the discovery of a long-missing piece of Kansas City information, never before reported about the young writer in the making.

            Years ago, I’d been put on the trail of this piece of business by the great Hemingway biographer Michael S. Reynolds. Everyone in the world of Hemingway scholarship owed a debt to Reynolds for his important work over the years, including an impressive five-volume biography published in the 1980s and ‘90s. Reynolds’ earlier book, Hemingway’s First War, about the making of A Farewell to Arms, was also vitally important to my understanding of the dynamics of Hemingway’s young-adult life and work.

Being a newcomer to the game, I’d only encountered Reynolds in 1999, Hemingway’s centennial year, and, sadly, just a year before he died. I’d met Reynolds at conferences and helped arrange a speaking engagement for him in Kansas City to promote the centennial and the publication of his fifth book in the series. I didn’t realize until we chatted one day over lunch that Reynolds had a family connection in Kansas City, which, of course, deepened my regard for him.

            I had just begun researching details of Hemingway’s brief apprenticeship at The Kansas City Star and the state of the city in which he lived – at the age of 18 -- for six and a half months.

            In one brief email with Reynolds after we’d met, he assigned me a task as I carried on my research: Find out about Hemingway’s appearance before a Kansas City grand jury.

            I tried. I cajoled judges and prosecutors over the years, hoping to gain access to Jackson County District Court records of a grand jury involving General Hospital. Reynolds and I had assumed that Hemingway had been subpoenaed to discuss his reporting on mismanagement at the hospital in the midst of small-pox and meningitis epidemics, ambulance shortages and possible graft and corruption. I got nowhere. Nor could I find newspaper reports of such a grand jury.

            But, 16 years after Mike Reynolds put me onto the challenge, I finally found the evidence. As I write in the book, the case involved not the hospital but an odd shooting incident pitting federal agents against Kansas City police. And the grand jury was summoned not by the state court but by a U.S. District Court judge. I found the case file at the National Archives at Kansas City. I found Hemingway’s name on a witness list. The road went cold after that. The Star, in its reporting about an indictment, did not mention Hemingway’s appearance before the grand jury. In addition, the archived documents did not detail the young journalist’s testimony or include a deposition.

Within a week of Hemingway’s presumed court appearance, he left Kansas City for the Red Cross ambulance service in Italy. Nowhere in my experience reading Hemingway’s correspondence and other materials did he ever mention testifying before a grand jury. So it was a minor achievement and a gratifying bit of biographical research to confirm at least that he had been summonsed.

Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston

            Yet something still nagged me -- even after I’d finished my book and tacked on the afterthought about the grand jury. Reynolds clearly had implied to me that Hemingway had been subpoenaed by a court in Kansas City. When I revisited his email, it dawned on me finally that he knew that to be true. It was not just an assumption. But I didn’t know how he knew that. Years ago, Ann Reynolds, his widow, had allowed me to rummage through his files in their home in the New Mexico desert, but I never came across that detail. And the court records delivered to me by an archivist at the National Archives a year ago also did not include a copy of the pertinent subpoena.

            As if to prove that a writer’s work is never done – you know where this story is headed – I found myself in Boston last spring with a few hours to spare. I made another trip out to Columbia Point and the John F. Kennedy Library’s Hemingway Collection. I’d spent many productive hours there in the past. Now I wanted to look at some materials I’d never tripped over before among the many thousands of pages of manuscripts, letters and quotidian documents.

            In a box of folders marked humbly as “Other Materials” I came across a file labeled “Court.” Well, boy howdy, there it was. A subpoena issued April 23, 1918, for “E.M. Hemingway, Reporter Star” by a judge of the Western District of the U.S. District Court. Reynolds surely saw that piece of paper. And I can’t stop dwelling on the thought of how much time I might have saved—and how much more I could have learned—had I found it years ago, too.

About This Blog

I’m a relative latecomer to Hemingway studies. My entry into the field came by way of journalism, beginning in 1998, when I spotted the 100th anniversary of Hemingway’s birth coming down the pike. Over the next half a year or more, I dove in completely. Read and reread the works, the Selected Letters, criticism, etc; attended centennial conferences in Oak Park and Boston; interviewed some writers for a Hemingway Review article on Hemingway’s influence (my debut in THR, 1999); and began researching Hemingway’s Kansas City period, discovering new material and compiling all that I could. That last effort led to the publication of Hemingway at Eighteen in 2017. (See the webpage devoted to my book elsewhere on this site.) Over the years I contributed more articles to The Hemingway Review and the Hemingway Society Newsletter and wrote a handful of pieces for the Kansas City Star that seem to hold up, including some reporting from Cuba and elsewhere on the Hemingway trail. I’ve recently become something like the assistant bibliographer for THR, helping Kelli Larson to compile the twice-a-year roundups of scholarly essays and books. Earlier this year I deposited the physical files related to Hemingway at Eighteen in the LaBudde Special Collections at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Nichols Library. In recent years, I’ve tiptoed back into my digital research files from time to time and have realized that there is much material that might be useful to me and others if only it could find daylight. Well, here we go. I plan to post random notes, as well as archived stories. I’m not sure there’ll be a logical thread running through it all. More like a miscellany that can be dipped into whenever a reader finds something of interest.