For generations, Ernest Hemingway was like a patron saint of newsrooms. Reporters aspired to be like him in manner and style. His writing persona was whittled down to a few essentials, whispered like rosaries: Write what you know. Eschew verbiage. Direct is better.
But what is his legacy? Today we know him for his books, fact-based but usually fictional. Yet articles he actually wrote for newspapers and magazines do exist, and were collected by William White in this collection published six years after Hemingway’s death.
As pieces of writing, Byline: Ernest Hemingway showcases much of that lean, terse style reporters once held dear, for better and for worse. As reportage, however, they are often bloated, meandering, and focused to a fault on a single subject, Papa Hemingway himself.
When he’s feeling down, man, he lets you know it:
If you want a Paris letter full of spice and detail and funny cracks you will have to get someone else to write it. All I do is go out and get depressed and wish I were somewhere else. It is only for three weeks but it is very gloomy.
So Hemingway reports in “A Paris Letter,” a characteristically solipsistic piece he filed for Esquire in February, 1934.
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| Hemingway's passport photo in 1923, his last full year writing for his first employer, the Toronto Daily Star. Image from https://www.reddit.com/r/ColorizedHistory/comments/6sm5hm/ernest_hemingways_passport_photo_1923/ |
This book falls into three parts. The first, from 1920-1924, contains highlights from his period as a roving reporter for the Toronto Daily Star, just before he produced his breakthrough short-story collection in our time. Next come the Esquire pieces, produced from 1933-1936 at the height of his early fame. Finally comes his later journalism of the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, which covered the Spanish Civil War, World War II, but mostly Papa Hemingway himself:
“Say, correspondent,” another soldier called. “One thing I can’t understand. You tell me, will you? What are you doing here if you don’t have to be here? Do you do it just for the money?”
“Sure,” I said. “Big money. Lots of money.” [“The General and the G. I.,” Collier’s, November 1944]
Fortunately for us readers, Hemingway led an interesting life. Though Byline: Ernest Hemingway hits the same topics (bullfighting, hunting, fishing, and the life of a celebrity writer) over and over, it gives you a chance to see one of his century’s most intriguing figures up close.
The first section, consisting of pieces written for the Toronto Daily Star and Toronto Star Weekly, are the closest to Hemingway in real-reporter mode. Not yet famous and writing to earn his bread, he produces pieces designed to entertain and edify an audience unconcerned with the author’s identity. Many of these articles originally appeared without bylines.
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| Hemingway (at right) visits a bullfighting arena in Madrid with a friend. Hemingway first saw a bullfight in 1923 for a Toronto Star Weekly article, which transformed him into a lifelong aficionado. Image from https://boardingpasstraveler.com/2015/08/17/exploring-hemingways-madrid/ |
Some are quite charming, like an early piece about barbers:
For a visit to the barber college requires the cold, naked valor of the man who walks clear-eyed to death. If you don’t believe it, go to the beginner’s department of the barber’s college and offer yourself for a free shave. I did. [“A Free Shave,” The Toronto Star Weekly, March 6, 1920]
Later come glimpses of the mature Hemingway, master of description:
…there is a café across the station that has a galloping gold horse on top, a great wisteria vine as thick through as a young tree that branches out and shades the porch with hanging bunches of purple flowers that bees go in and out of all day long and that glisten after a rain; green tables with green chairs, and seventeen per cent dark beer. The beer comes foaming out in great glass mugs that hold a quart and costs forty centimes, and the barmaid smiles and asks about your luck. [“Fishing the Rhone Canal,” The Toronto Daily Star, June 10, 1922]
The fact he was writing pieces like this while simultaneously laboring over future classics of American fiction is pleasant to think on. As William White notes in a brief introduction, prose in his articles sometimes shows up later in his better-known work, such as a refugee march featured in his short story “On the Quai at Smyrna.”
Even better is a profile on Pamplona in Spain reminiscent of his greatest work, The Sun Also Rises, word-painting the Festival of San Fermin: “Men, blue-shirted, bareheaded, rolling and floating in a wild fantastic dance down the street behind the rolling drums and shrill fifes.”
Not all these Toronto Star pieces hold up as well across the great divide of time, and they are followed by much longer Esquire pieces, where the focus is more squarely on Hemingway the celebrity taking his ease.
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| Hemingway aboard the Pilar, a boat he kept in Cuba. Many of his Esquire pieces focus on marlin fishing. "Anyone can hook a hungry fish who gives him enough line, doesn’t backlash and sets the hook hard enough," he explains in a 1933 Esquire article. "What happens then is something else." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway |
A common problem with the Esquire articles is the way they wander off-topic. Often there isn’t a clear topic. A piece which starts off with Hemingway ruminating on being mentioned in the Spanish press as a “Friend of Spain” sidetrips into reviewing different kinds of matadors. Another letter, written in Key West, starts off by listing Hemingway’s favorite books, then dovetails into cataloging birds for shooting.
He’s a trifle defensive about his hunting, though never shy: “I think that they were made to shoot and some of us were made to shoot them and if that is not so well, never say we did not tell you that we liked it.”
The Spanish Civil War should have been a showcase for Hemingway the correspondent; instead it seems to have been a dud, judging from the evidence here. A prototypical Ugly American, he writes about hotels and chauffeurs and meals while occasionally taking a moment to record himself lecturing civilians about the carnage they are experiencing.
The North American Newspaper Alliance must have sent him to Spain knowing he would forego objectivity and write pieces exclusively for one side of the conflict, the Republican side, as Hemingway was a man of the left. But they couldn’t have been pleased with the smug, stale tone of the results.
Noting the resilience of one of his Republican chauffeurs after a bombing, Hemingway declares: “You can bet on Franco, or Mussolini, or Hitler, if you want. But my money goes on Hipolito.”
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| Hemingway did double-duty while covering the Spanish Civil War, writing the script for a pro-Republican documentary The Spanish Earth. He is pictured at left with the documentary's director, Joris Ivers, in 1937. Image from https://spanish-civil-war.tumblr.com/page/14 |
The Republicans lost that war anyway, which must have made Hemingway leery of taking stands. He recommends an isolationist course in the lead-up to World War II, even calling out then-British leader Neville Chamberlain for trying to drag America into war:
Let the gentlemen of Europe fight and, if they pay cash, see how long it will last. Why not be realists, Mr. Chamberlain? Why not be realists? Or don’t you want to play? [“A Program for U. S. Realism,” Ken, August 11, 1938.]
Once the war began, however, Hemingway espoused a more moderate position, evidently grasping the existential threat the war posed even to neutrals. For PM, a short-lived ad-less magazine, he spent a fortnight in June 1941 analyzing China’s defensive war against Japan, and its ramifications for the American situation.
His analysis would be outdated before month’s end by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, but he shows an ability here to engage the reader in geopolitics and push forcefully against the notion of Chinese Nationalist military sloth you get from reading Barbara Tuchman:
The atmosphere at the Chinese front with the men who had fought the war lords for five years, the Communists for 10 and the Japanese for nearly four was as different from that of a British staff as the locker room of the Green Bay Packers professional football team would be from even such a good prep school as Choate.
A fair point, especially when you consider China fought off the Axis longer than anyone else. Yet his PM pieces are dry reading.
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| Hemingway studies a map while an American officer looks on. In an October 1944 Collier's article, Hemingway recalls briefly taking charge of a band of French guerrillas trying to move around a German ambush. Image from https://stoessisheroes.com/meet-the-heroes-us-novelist-war-reporter-ernest-hemingway/ |
Hemingway’s World War II reporting is better, and includes a memorable description of Omaha Beach on D-Day, where he watches from a landing craft as German batteries light up American tanks. He also joins a unit of French guerrillas en route to liberate Paris, and recalls in “How We Came to Paris” for Collier’s in 1944 seeing his old home on the Seine awaiting him in its hushed majesty:
I couldn’t say anything more then, because I had a funny choke in my throat and I had to clean my glasses because there now, below us, gray and always beautiful, was spread the city I love best in all the world.
For all the ego and self-referential lens, moments like that still impress. After that, though, his articles become a series of hunting and fishing dissertations, like which fishing lines to use on which marlins.
In a 1954 two-parter for Look magazine, Hemingway explains how he and his wife were nearly killed in a pair of plane crashes days apart. His mood here is surprisingly jovial. Describing being marooned, miles from any habitation, he makes for good company, if not essential reading:
During the night, visits from curious elephants were more or less routine but the only defensive measures taken against these large beasts, who, incidentally, can assume imposing proportions in the moonlight, were to maintain strict silence and to hold and rehold any sound of breathing which might be offensive to these elephants who were, really, our hosts.
In his introduction, White notes Hemingway’s expressed reluctance to be remembered for his journalism, “writing to make stuff timely rather than permanent.” Reading Byline, you get what he meant.
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| After surviving two 1954 air crashes hours apart, Hemingway amused himself (and annoyed his wife Mary) by reading over and over again all the premature obituaries newspapers produced about him. "I intend to read them at least once a year in order to keep my morale up to par when the critics have recovered their aplomb and return to the assault," he wrote. Image from https://blog.bookstellyouwhy.com/ten-tidbits-about-ernest-hemingway |
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