Hemingway: A Scholar's Lifelong Pursuit

It started with a term paper for the fall 1949 American Literature course at Yale supervised by Norman Holmes Pearson and Stanley Williams. Pearson was in charge that semester and hoisted himself on top of a table, his hunchbacked body thus elevated to lecture from a position of authority. This was something of a shock to the sizable audience of Yale juniors and seniors in the room. Few of us knew about Pearson's handicap, and even fewer about his surprising role in the military.

As an officer for the OSS during the war, he was surreptitiously parachuted into occupied France and became a successful spy, with the joint advantages of his hunchback and his mastery of demotic French working in his favor. Pearson was also a scout for the newly formed CIA, on the lookout for promising students to function for that organization after graduation. William F. Buckley was among the stars he recruited. I was not. Instead, I was an undistinguished English major in his final year whose personal life would become complicated in the six months that followed (including an affair with a married woman, twelve years my senior, who was an accomplished instructor) before graduation. Other classmates' graduation, as it developed. Not mine.

As a term paper project for Pearson's class, I wrote an analysis of Ernest Hemingway's short stories combining the small holdings of criticism located in the massive Sterling library with a few insights of my own in a long and not entirely mediocre essay. Pearson liked it, grading it A+. The success of my paper inspired me to submit it separately to Charles Fenton, Pearson's particular disciple, as my senior honors thesis. I was caught and punished for this unethical act—"trimming," Fenton called it—with graduation delayed a year and a rewrite required. This was not altogether a bad thing, for I got to observe Fenton's happy situation at home and began to imagine fashioning a life for myself along similar lines. He also gave me an example to follow, for he would soon publish The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years, his first and most impressive book based on his doctoral dissertation for Pearson. So, I set about following Fenton's career, and was shocked like many others when, in the summer of 1960, he took his own life by stepping off the roof of the Washington Duke Hotel in Durham, NC, where he was a young and apparently successful full professor at Duke University. During my retirement years, I tried to come to grips with his suicide in Death of a Rebel: The Charlie Fenton Story. It was painful to write. My best source turned out to be speculations on that same subject in the long-ignored papers of Norman Holmes Pearson at Yale's Beinecke Library.

First Efforts

There was a long hiatus before I resumed expending efforts on and writing about Hemingway and his work. First, I put in nearly three years as an enlisted man in the Army Security Agency, where I spent much of my time copying Chinese communist Morse code messages at a base near Kyoto Japan. I was far from expert in that endeavor, and the highlight of my Japanese assignment came on two visits to Jim Greenfield's handsome house in Tokyo, where—a lowly enlisted man—I had the chance to converse with generals and, better yet, such star newsmen as Phil Potter of the Baltimore Sun and Keyes Beech of the Chicago Daily News. Greenfield himself was the Time-Life man in Tokyo. During this time, I fancied myself a writer, a newspaperman, and on return to the United States in the last days of 1955, I was lucky enough to land a job as a cub reporter (at $51 a week) on the Minneapolis Star, the city's evening paper. My beat involved covering stories from three major suburbs—Edina, Richfield, and Bloomington—then fast-growing with small houses designed for GI-bill veterans returning from the wars.

Of the three, I especially covered...