Morgan Library exhibition presents an Ernest Hemingway for the twenty-first century

Library of America fans are strongly encouraged to visit the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City for the new exhibition Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars, a revelatory re-examination of a writer whose outsized fame has often threatened to overshadow everything that’s best about his work.

Organized in partnership with the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, the show is a bonanza of manuscripts and typescripts, first editions, correspondence, and personal mementos. It follows Hemingway from his service as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I, where he was badly wounded, to his stint as a war correspondent accompanying Allied troops across France in 1944–45. (Hemingway’s October 1944 dispatch for Collier’s, “How We Came to Paris,” is included in the Library of America anthology Reporting World War II: Volume Two: American Journalism 1944–1946.)

Hemingway’s 1923 passport (detail).
The Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection.
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

With an emphasis on his Paris years (1921–28) and on the craft of writing, Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars is unmistakably meant to supplant memories of Hemingway’s later public persona—the overbearing “Papa,” who starred in ads for Ballantine Ale and Parker 51 pens and who was invariably photographed in the pages of LIFE and Look with a shotgun or fishing rod in hand.

Instead, the exhibition foregrounds the ambitious young talent with avant-garde leanings who adopted Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound as his mentors soon after arriving in Paris and who claimed he learned how to write from studying Cezanne paintings at the Musée du Luxembourg. These were the years when he set about forging the deceptively simple prose style that would become an inescapable influence on generations of American writers.

Stein’s advice after reading Hemingway’s work for the first time was “Begin over again and concentrate.” The most illuminating aspect of the Morgan exhibition is how keenly he took those words to heart. Manuscript pages on display reveal a determined self-editor who could cut eight pages from the beginning of the story “Indian Camp” in 1924 and two entire chapters from the opening of The Sun Also Rises two years later. These and the other revisions documented in the exhibit make it clear we can all be grateful Hemingway made the choices he did. (Another revelation: the author had to fight to convince his squeamish publishers to keep the term “bed pan” in A Farewell to Arms.)

Three Stories & Ten Poems, [Paris]: Contact
Publishing Co., 1923. The Carter Burden Collection of
American Literature, The Morgan Library & Museum,
photography by Graham S. Haber, 2014.

For Hemingway devotees, there will be a special appeal in seeing physical copies of his rare early publications like 1923’s Three Stories & Ten Poems (printed in an edition of 300) and the first, 1924 version of In Our Time (printed in an edition of 170). Meanwhile, many of the other items on display—such as the ticket stubs from bullfights in Pamplona and Madrid, and an encouraging letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald written on ocean liner stationery—are redolent of an old-fashioned expatriate glamour.

Winding down at the close of World War II, the exhibition sidesteps the saga of Hemingway’s later years, when drinking, depression, and a staggering number of medical problems took their toll on both his writing and his psyche. Yet the Morgan’s curator, Declan Kiely, manages to close on a fascinating forward-looking note.

One of the last items on view is a 1945 letter to Hemingway from J. D. Salinger, written when the latter was recovering from what was then euphemistically known as “combat fatigue” in a U.S. Army hospital in Nuremburg, Germany. The two men had met briefly in Paris just after its liberation in 1944, an encounter Salinger recalls as “the only helpful minutes of the whole business.” It’s increasingly a critical commonplace to read The Catcher in the Rye as a kind of sublimated war novel, but the less obvious parallel is between the stark purity of Hemingway’s early stories and the Zen distillations of Salinger’s short fiction, which date from more than a generation later. By drawing that line, the exhibition hints at some tantalizing potential affinities that can enhance our appreciation of both authors and of American writing over a forty-year period.

Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars is on view at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City through January 31, 2016. Visit themorgan.org for complete exhibition information.

Related posts:

• Lev Grossman on Ernest Hemingway, verbal membrane, and The Sun Also Rises
• Errol Louis on Ernest Hemingway, Westbrook Pegler, and other great “deadline artists”
• Maxwell Perkins: editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dawn Powell, and Thomas Wolfe

Remembering James Tate, 1943–2015: “I love my funny poems, but I’d rather break your heart”

James Tate, one of the most lauded American poets of his generation, died on July 8 at the age of 71 in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Tate was still a graduate student at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1967 when his collection The Lost Pilot was chosen for publication in the influential Yale Series of Younger Poets. During a career that spanned nearly 50 years and more than 20 books, he won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.

The Lost Pilot
by James Tate
(Yale University Press, 1967)

The title poem of Tate’s first book, “The Lost Pilot,” is included in the Library of America collection Poets of World War II. The work is an elegy for Tate’s father, a bomber pilot in the Army Air Forces who was killed on a mission over Germany in April 1944 when Tate was five months old. The Poetry Foundation website has audio of Tate reading the poem, along with an Essential American Poets podcast featuring additional readings and a helpful introduction to Tate’s work.

Friends and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where Tate taught for more than 40 years, remember him here. A highly recommended 2006 Paris Review interview with Tate, conducted by Charles Simic, includes this memorable statement of his artistic creed:

I love my funny poems, but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best. If you laughed earlier in the poem, and I bring you close to tears in the end, that’s the best. That’s most rewarding for you and for me too. I want ultimately to be serious, but I can’t help the comic part. It just comes automatically. And if I can do both, that’s what I’m after.

Tate’s seventeenth collection of poems, Dome of the Hidden Pavilion, will be published in August.

Margaret MacMillan on how Barbara W. Tuchman’s historical writings endure

Margaret MacMillan, historian and author of Paris 1919, recently spoke with us about Barbara W. Tuchman: The Guns of August, The Proud Tower, which she edited for The Library of America and which will be published next week.

The Guns of August has deeply affected readers since it was first published in 1962—perhaps most famously President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Do you remember your reactions to the book when you first read it?

I read The Guns of August when it first came out. I was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto taking history, which I already loved, but when I read her book I thought this was the way history should be. I found it riveting and I wanted to write like her.

Tuchman joins Henry Adams, Francis Parkman, W.E.B. Du Bois, and John Kenneth Galbraith as the very few historians published in The Library of America series. What parallels do you see between her work and theirs? What is the significance (if any) in her being the first woman in the group?

Perhaps what joins them all—although they have written very different sorts of histories—is that they all see the big picture and they all write beautifully. As for her being the first woman in the group, someone has to be and at the time she was writing there were far fewer women who counted as serious historians or with university posts. It is different today, thank goodness.

What is distinctive about Tuchman’s approach to the historian’s craft?

What stands out is her combination of very solid research and good writing. She always believed that history was a branch of literature.

What in your view gives Tuchman's work its staying power?

Her work lasts because it is highly readable and entertaining; it gives a strong sense of the past and of the characters involved; and it provides solid, evidence-based, analysis of subjects that we are still interested in such as the outbreak of World War One.

Joseph J. Corn on Into the Blue and how air warfare has evolved over the past century

Few books The Library of America has published offer quite such a far-ranging mix of ingenuity, daring, suspense, lyricism, and technical know-how as Into the Blue: American Writers on Aviation and Spaceflight, the new anthology that just arrived in the warehouse. In an exclusive interview (PDF) for the September LOA e-Newsletter volume editor Joseph J. Corn shared several of the book’s many highlights:

LOA: You note in your introduction that “One of the first practical purposes mankind found for the airplane was killing people.” Into the Blue effectively documents how dramatically the use of planes for warfare has changed over the past century: from World War I dogfights to what flight crews in Afghanistan call “the Kabul-ki Dance.” How would you characterize this progression? 

Corn: Yes, the use of airplanes to kill people—purposefully, not just accidentally—emerged early. In a 1914 selection published just after the start of World War I and before any Americans flew in the conflict, aviator Glenn L. Martin offered a prophesy as to how “veritable flying death,” as he called it, would change the face of warfare. 

He correctly divined the role that aircraft would play in reconnaissance, plane-to-plane combat, and bombing, although in the latter he strangely seems to have imagined that a major form of bombing would be suicide missions. “One man, driving an aeroplane laden with high explosives,” he wrote, would “dive like a plummet upon the bows of a great warship and destroy it. He gives one life, the enemy gives many.” Such sacrifices never became part of American tactics, but reconnaissance, dogfights, and dropping high explosives on enemies became staples of air warfare. 

By World War II military fliers added a number of new missions to this basic trio. Close support of ground troops became more important, as is seen in Samuel Hynes’s account of flying in Okinawa in 1945, dropping food, fuel, and other supplies to ground forces in parts of the island where just miles away the Japanese were still resisting. Air support of ground troops changed again in Vietnam, as Esquire reporter Michael Herr reports from his experience there from 1967–68. Armed as gunships, helicopters moved men and supplies and worked intimately with the infantry. 

Different still is the mission implicit in Sherman Baldwin’s gripping account of a night landing on a moving carrier deck during the Gulf War. His heavy EA-6B Prowler aircraft, with a crew of four, existed not to attack or bomb but solely to monitor and jam enemy communications; in part this was reconnaissance updated for the electronic age, but in using electronics as a weapon, it was also new. A similar but more high-tech chapter of ground support is presently visible in the skies over Afghanistan, as journalist Mark Bowden reports in the selection, “The Kabul-ki Dance.” The Air Force F-15s loitering over Kabul serve like taxis, awaiting communications from the ground on where to deliver the next lethal air-to-ground strike. 

In short, the missions our military has flown over nearly a century demonstrate continuity as well as change, defined and shaped in large part by the growing power of computerized communications technologies.

Read the entire interview (PDF)

Also of interest:

• “Twelve Strangers in the Night” by Elizabeth M. Bisgood, an excerpt from Into the Blue and a previous Story of the Week
• “The Flying Fool” by Waverly Root, about Charles A. Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris, a previous Story of the Week
• A Reader’s Almanac post about William Faulkner and his barnstorming pilot brother, Dean

Related LOA works: Into the Blue: American Writers on Aviation and Spaceflight

Richard Snow on America’s “Hooligan Navy” vs. German U-boats in the early days of WWII

Guest blog post by Richard Snow, former American Heritage editor-in-chief and author of A Measureless Peril: America in the Fight for the Atlantic, the Longest Battle of World War II, which has just been published in paperback

I’ve been reading with pleasure and admiration The Library of America’s Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1944. This seems to me more than an anthology of fine journalism: the articles are arranged in such fluent chronology that the book also offers a uniquely vivid narrative history—at once intimate and spacious—of the entire war.

I was particularly struck with Helen Lawrenson’s stark account of what the men of the Merchant Marine were up against in the first months after America’s entry into the conflict. Her story underscores a part of the war that has nearly vanished from the national memory.

The men Lawrenson writes about were being attacked by German submarines not in the far, stormy reaches of the North Atlantic but, in one sinking she mentions, within sight of the shore lights of Fort Pitt, Florida. The Battle of the Atlantic was the only campaign of the war whose progress American civilians could often watch from their homes.

As soon as Germany declared war on the United States, Admiral Karl Doenitz, the dismayingly capable head of Hitler’s U-boat fleet, was eager to get to our east coast. He believed Germany’s only chance was to throttle Great Britain by cutting off the supplies America was sending. He knew that ninety-five per cent of the oil from the Louisiana and Texas fields went in tankers along the coast, and he guessed that our navy, now spread thin, could do little to protect this crucial traffic.

He was right. A month later Captain Reinhard Hardegan, the first U-boat skipper to arrive, cruised around unchallenged in New York harbor: “I cannot describe the feeling in words,” he said “but it was unbelievable and beautiful and great. . . We were the first to be here, and for the first time in this war a German soldier looked out on the coast of the USA.”

A few hours later he torpedoed the Coimbra, carrying 80,000 barrels of oil (fifty-three gallons to the barrel) so close inshore that Long Island citizens called local police stations to report a fire.

That May another U-boat captain harvesting this rich field arrived off Miami and was astounded to find the city glowing bright. This early in the war, nobody seemed to have the authority to order the mayor to turn off the lights. When the Navy begged Mayor Reeder to extinguish them, he said the hell with that: it would discourage the tourists.

The spectacle certainly cheered at least one tourist. Captain Cremer of the U-333 wrote, “Against the footlight glare of a carefree new world were passing the silhouettes of ships recognizable in every detail and shape as the outlines in a sales catalog. Here they were formally presented to us on a plate: please help yourselves.”

The Germans helped themselves with a free hand. In the first four months of 1942 the U-boats sank 515,000 tons—eighty-seven ships—along the East Coast.

The government responded to the crisis by bringing into the service yachts and sports fishing boats and their owners—equipping the larger vessels with a couple of depth charges or a pair of twenty-millimeter guns and begging their crews to do what they could. (Ernest Hemingway got in on the act, talking the navy out of $32,000 worth of range and direction finding equipment for his thirty-eight-foot fishing boat Pilar.)

The improvised mini-navy couldn’t do much, of course, and it certainly didn’t intimidate the Germans. Once, off the Florida coast, the crew of a militant cabin cruiser was astounded to see rise from the sea beside them a tall steel conning tower, from which the skipper called down in what was reported to be “excellent Americanese”: “Get the hell out of here, you guys! Do you want to get hurt? Now scram.”

The Coast Guard gave these little boats the gallant name the Corsair Fleet. The fleet’s members knew their chances. They immediately christened themselves the Hooligan Navy.

Nevertheless, they went out night after night, month after month. If they never hurt a U-boat, they were there combing the debris of what were in effect scores of forgotten Pearl Harbors for survivors of torpedoed ships. They saved hundreds.

It is worth remembering that this is the first time since the War of 1812 that the United States sent raw militia against the world’s best-trained professional military men. And that there are still people among us today who owe their lives to the fact that the Hooligan Navy was on duty when the war came to our shores.

Also of interest:

• Richard Snow describes his new book A Measureless Peril (YouTube)
• Watch a 47-minute documentary about the Hooligan Navy at the National Sailing Hall of Fame Film Library
• In 2009 Terry Mort wrote a book about Hemingway’s search patrols: The Hemingway Patrols: Ernest Hemingway and His Search for U-Boats
• Cornelius Ryan on D-Day, a previous Reader's Almanac post

Related LOA works: Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1944

W. H. Auden, A. J. Liebling: September 1 writings frame World War II in Europe

The nonaggression pact signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, between Germany and the Soviet Union included a secret clause providing for the partition of Poland between the two signing powers. On September 1, German tanks and planes invaded Poland on three fronts and World War II began. The outbreak stirred W. H. Auden, 32 and newly arrived in the United States in January, to write one of his most anthologized poems, “September 1, 1939,” first published in The New Republic on October 18 of that year.

Set in “one of the dives/On Fifty-Second Street” the 99-line poem attempts to locate the individual’s place in the world historical order. Whether Auden actually wrote it in a Manhattan bar or in the home of the father of his lover Chester Kallman is a matter of some dispute. In later years, as Auden moved away from politics, he came to disown the poem, calling it “the most dishonest poem I have ever written,” especially its most famous stanza:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

The last line of this stanza—its most quoted line—troubled Auden the most, since we die whether we love one another or not. At one point, in granting permission to Oscar Williams to reprint the poem in an anthology in 1955, Auden changed the line to “We must love one another and die.”

Listen to Dylan Thomas read “September 1, 1939.”
Read the entire poem.

Five years later, on September 1, 1944, A. J. Liebling dispatched one of his most famous “Letters from Paris.” The Allied Forces had liberated Paris on August 25 and Liebling captures the joy and relief of a city transformed: “For the first time in my life and probably the last, I have lived for a week in a great city where everybody is happy. Moreover, since the city is Paris, everybody makes this euphoria manifest.”

As Liebling details how different factions in Paris came together to defeat their occupiers, his account can almost be seen as a response to the charge in Auden’s poem:

Happiest of all . . . are the police, who stand at street intersections with their thumbs in their belts and beam paternally at everybody instead of looking stern and important, as they used to. . . . For Paris, where the street cry has always been “A bas les flics!” (Down with the cops!), this is behavior so unprecedented that the cops sometimes look as though they think it is all a dream. There is good reason for the change of heart; for the first time since Etienne Marcel led a street mob against the royal court in about 1350, the police and the people have been on the same side of the barricades. It was the police who, on August 15th, gave the signal for a mass disregard of the Germans by going on strike. It was also the police who, four days later, began the street fighting by seizing the Prefecture of the Seine, their headquarters. . . . Three thousand of them, in plainclothes and armed with carbines, revolvers, and a few sub-machine guns, took the place over and defended it successfully for six days before being relieved by the arrival of the French armored division of General Leclerc.

Aiding the police were “boys fourteen or fifteen years old” who destroyed tanks by throwing bottles of incendiary fluid through their ports. “The youngsters who did the fighting were not always of the type that is ordinarily on good terms with the police. They included problem children of every neighborhood as well as students and factory workers. So the oldest of all Paris feuds has ended.”

Read the entire “Letter from Paris, September 1, 1944” (PDF).

Related LOA works: Poets of World War II; A. J. Liebling: World War II Writings

Ernie Pyle still sets the style

To think that Ernie Pyle would have turned 110 today is one way of measuring just how far in the past World War II lies—and how enduring Pyle's reporting has proved. Ernie Pyle had already developed a following for his folksy syndicated columns about daily life in America when he began covering the war from London in 1940. Over the next five years his dispatches from Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific would make him the most read—and most imitated—reporter on the war. On April 18, 1945, Pyle was hit in the temple by Japanese machine-gun fire on Ie Shima, an island off Okinawa Honto, and died instantly.

In a 1950 reminiscence in The New Yorker, his colleague, wartime correspondent A. J. Liebling, offered this profile, “Pyle Set the Style”:

The thin old-looking reporter who was killed by a Japanese sniper on Ie Shima in April, 1945 (he was only forty-four, but to enlisted men he seemed as old as a senior admiral), contributed a stock figure to the waxworks gallery of American history as popularly remembered. To a list that includes the frontiersman, the Kentucky colonel, the cowboy, and Babe Ruth, Ernest Taylor Pyle, to give him the full name nobody ever called him by, added G. I. Joe, the suffering but triumphant infantryman. The portrait was sentimentalized but the soldier was pleased to recognize himself in it, and millions of newspaper readers recognized their sons and lovers in Pyle’s soldiers and got some glimmer of the fact that war is a nasty business for the pedestrian combatant. Through millions of letters from home enclosing clippings, the soldiers learned that their folks read Ernie Pyle. He provided an emotional bridge. . . . He was the only American war correspondent who made a large personal impress on the nation in the Second World War.

Pyle’s dispatches focused not on military strategy but on the experiences of the common foot soldier, as in this report, “The God-Damned Infantry,” from Northern Tunisia in May 1943:

The men are walking. They are fifty feet apart, for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion. On their shoulders and backs they carry heavy steel tripods, machine-gun barrels, leaden boxes of ammunition. Their feet seem to sink into the ground from the overload they are bearing. They don't slouch. It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their appalling tiredness. Their faces are black and unshaven. They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middle-aged. In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory — there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else. The line moves on, but it never ends. All afternoon men keep coming round the hill and vanishing eventually over the horizon. It is one long tired line of antlike men. There is an agony in your heart and you almost feel ashamed to look at them. They are just guys from Broadway and Main Street, but you wouldn't remember them. They are too far away now. They are too tired. Their world can never be known to you, but if you could see them just once, just for an instant, you would know that no matter how hard people work back home they are not keeping pace with these infantrymen in Tunisia.

The above excerpts are from Reporting World War II: 1938-1946 (two volumes) and A. J. Liebling: World War II Writings.

Cornelius Ryan on D-Day: Nothing like a reporter chasing his story

The Longest Day—the book Michael Shapiro writes “changed journalism”—began with 1,150 responses to Cornelius Ryan’s questionnaire. “The Reporter Who Time Forgot” tells the story behind the book.

Ryan had initially proposed a D-Day book about only the first two or three hours of the invasion. But then he began to report, and his ads (“Personal: Were You There on 6 June 1944?”) yielded thousands of responses. He followed up with a three-page questionnaire that could serve as a primer for reconstructing a narrative: Where did you land and at what time? What was the trip like during the crossing? Do you remember, for example, any conversations you had or how you passed the time? Were you wounded? Do you remember what it was like—that is, do you remember whether you felt any pain or were you so surprised that you felt nothing?

Related LOA works: Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1944–1946; A J Liebling: World War II Writings