Ernest Hemingway was a young man when he left Oak Park and it was many years before they realized how much they liked him. His family still lived in a handsome house on Kenilworth Avenue when The Sun Also Rises was published and the Tribune reviewed it using words like “trivial” and “degraded.” Grace Hall Hemingway was ashamed to show her face at the Current Books Study Group after that. I would give a trip to Havana to see her sashay into one of her old hangouts like the Nineteenth Century Woman’s Club next week when Oak Park throws him a 100th birthday party with a bull run and a conference of scholars and two black-tie dances that would make any mother proud.
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Never mind that he said Oak Park is a place with “wide lawns and narrow minds” and always told people he hated it there. He said he ran away from home too and that was a lie. After his work had spawned a whole scholarship industry an explanation came to light. He associated the town with Grace, they said. That was not a happy thing because he usually referred to her as “that bitch.”
Nor did it help that she kicked him out. He had gone to the war in Italy as a Red Cross ambulance driver and got himself wounded and come back in a fine fake uniform that made it look like he was a soldier and then just hung around exaggerating his exploits. After more than a year of this, Grace wrote a letter advising him to “stop trying to graft a living off anybody and everybody.
“I was smaller than he was, but I could always lick him,” one of them bragged. “He was always yellow. He always tried to be the big shot and never was.”
“Son of a bitch,” she finally said, so the story goes. “He told me he grew up in a slum.”
