Ernest Hemingway: Knocking Over the Punch Bowl

I walked with my friends in an old Chicago suburb in Fall years ago. We had recently discovered beer and have stashed some in the bushes in an alley. Walking around, somewhat belligerently and immaturely, we came to an intersection. A person I was with suddenly stopped and said, “You know something I haven’t done in a while?” The person put his hand inside his sweatshirt sleeve and approached a garage. All of sudden I hear the loud echoing of glass breaking. In shock, I began to run and got split up from the people I was with.

If Carl Sandburg put down the figurative “Rah Rah Chicago Kool-Aid” then Ernest Hemingway knocked over the punch bowl of it. I admit I wasn’t even thinking of Hemingway when I wrote the previous post about Carl Sandburg; thank you for bringing it up “R.” Hemingway, the native author of Oak Park, Illinois, was injured while working as an ambulance driver in WWI. Hemingway wrote a short story about a soldier’s return home entitled, “Soldier’s Home.” The story reflects the main character’s, Harold Krebs, devastation from war and more importantly, inability to fit in with society. The girls have all grown up and the boys are all men now getting jobs and moving on with their lives. Harold’s mother says the following about working in “God’s Kingdom.”

“There can be no idle hands in His Kingdom.”
“I’m not in His Kingdom,” Krebs said.

Harold makes his mother cry by saying “No” when his mother asks if he loves her. Harold recants his statement and his mother says she will pray for him. Hemingway, the poor man, couldn’t adjust to society and felt as though he has nothing to believe in; this is further reflected in the famous “prayer” in “A Clean Well-lighted Place.”

“Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”

Hemingway was describing his own feelings of religion and his home: it was empty. The life he was brought up in, Oak Park (Chicago), isn’t compatible with his life after. After he had been away from Chicago in war and Europe, his perception was different. Whether it was trauma from war or being raised in “Chicagoland,” Hemingway got the hell out of Chicago with no motivation for returning; he realized life had so much more to offer. There wouldn’t be a cult like heroic praise for this man if he were not onto something. I cite the “Hemingway look alike” contest in the Florida Keys as evidence of this and his museums wherever the man lived and traveled.

Some consider Hemingway an “expatriate” who lived in Paris and drank wine. Hemingway was looking for fun, romance, adventure and experience; this means that he would have had to leave Chicago and America because, like me, he found it increasingly incompatible with romantic lives. Hemingway was a patriot for trying to show Chicagoans and Americans that there is more to life than just living in a police state, commuting 45 minutes to work everyday, and getting drunk and watching the Cubs.

Although I realize the days of expatriates are almost over, as America will find you even in Paris, I still have hope that maybe America can stop acting like a giant company and act more like a society. I truly wanted to find this element in Chicago; this is why I roamed around the city and suburbs. By coincidence I also became an ambulance driver, like Hemingway, as I mentioned in my “My Story” posts. Where everyday was spent seeing dying people and paralyzed gangsters taken back to their families.

If I even so much as brought this issue up with any Chicagoan, I would probably be told to “move to France.” I don’t want to move to France; in fact, I didn’t even want to leave Chicago but as Hemingway said about Oak Park, “Its full of wide lawns and narrow minds.” I didn’t even have to be the first one to say it. I can’t help but think that Hemingway is talking about Chicago as being the war; maybe this is why he shot himself.

I found the people I was with that Fall evening after being followed by a woman and her dog. My friend from the town later realized that, out of all the homes in Oak Park, the guy punched out Hemingway’s birth home garage window! Hemingway is one of my favorite people from Oak Park and the Chicago area.