War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway’s Early Life and Writings

Chapter 1: Hemingway in Kansas City The True Dope on Violence and Creative Sources in a Vile and Lively Place

HeMIngWaY In kansas CITY The True Dope on Violence and Creative Sources in a Vile and Lively Place Steve Paul This typing is a little woosy. But the light is bad and I am trying to make speed. —Ernest Hemingway, in a letter to his parents from Kansas City (December 17, 1917) On November 19, 1917, this crime item appeared on page one of the Kansas City Times, the morning edition of the Kansas City Star: Two thieves, found carting a quantity of cigars and tobacco away from the Parker-Gordon Cigar Company’s building, 1028 Broadway, shortly after midnight, were shot and killed by police in the chase that followed. Jack Farrell and Carl Grantello were the detectives who discovered the thieves at work and who fired at the men as they fled east to Main Street and north toward the city hall. A third robber was captured. F. P . Jennings was the man who was captured. The men who were killed were shot in the head. The police identified the dead men as “Cap” Gargetto and Joe Muco. (“Police Kill Two in Chase”) It’s unknown whether Ernest Hemingway wrote that four-paragraph news story. This was the Monday morning paper, and typically Sunday was his day off. He’d been a cub reporter at the newspaper for all of one month 1 2 STEVE PAUL and had just passed his thirty-day probation period, getting a raise and assurance of continued employment. Records are woefully incomplete, but among the eighteen year old’s duties at the paper in his six-and-ahalf -month stint, was reporting on news like this, which he gathered at Police Station No. 4, just a few blocks from the Star’s building. He would sift through the incident reports and pick out the ones that seemed ripe for treatment in the paper. There were knifings and shootings and reports of out-of-towners who had overdosed on narcotics and died. Whether or not Hemingway called in the details of the cigar shop robbery —most likely, he worked on a follow-up story for the afternoon edition later the same day—he clearly took mental note of the police chase and fatal shootings. As Hemingway readers and scholars certainly would have recognized, the story bears an obvious relationship to a fictional sketch Hemingway published in the earliest years of his writing life in Paris. This is a small piece of the Hemingway canon. At 130 words in four short paragraphs, the miniature story is known as chapter VIII in the U.S. edition of In Our Time (or chapter 9 in the original Paris edition) and is the only one of the Hemingway vignettes that directly reflects his Kansas City newspaper experience. (We know from a letter and other evidence that the vignette about the hanging of Sam Cardinella, often considered a Kansas City story, comes from Chicago.¹) The apparent evolution of chapter XVII from source material to Hemingway-made fiction provides a case study of the writer’s creative process. The existence of multiple drafts of the vignette, in the Hemingway Collection of the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, offers a compelling opportunity to investigate one of Hemingway’s earliest strategies—one born in the newsroom of the Kansas City Star—which was to transfer the facts of life into the truth of fiction. This essay will look at the mechanics of that creative work. It also will present broader context and a new piece of source material related to Hemingway’s attraction to the darker aspects of human behavior: the world of violence, grit, crime, and moral weakness, which he got to know up close during his Kansas City apprenticeship. In a sense, Hemingway’s writing radar got tuned in the newsroom, police stations, and hospital wards of Kansas City when he was an eighteen-year-old journalist. Scholars including Charles A. Fenton, Michael S. Reynolds, and Milton A. Cohen have previously examined this specific Kansas City connection in the cigar-store robbery story, but none based his analysis on the brief breaking- HEMINGWAY IN KANSAS CITY 3 news item that most closely resembles the form and four-paragraph brevity of Hemingway’s published vignette. Hemingway stepped off the train from Chicago on October 15, 1917, and, connected by his Uncle Tyler’s friendship with a top Star editor, he began his newspaper job two days later. Kansas...