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Growing up in Oak Park, Illinois, I was used to the Ernest Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright song and dance. Tributes and programs were always going on in the background, but being more interested in my own young life, I paid about as much attention to these events as if they had been wallpaper.
I left Oak Park in the '80s and always thought about going back to visit, but I needed an excuse. "Hemingway Centennial Conference/Literary and Historical Perspectives at 100" sounded perfect. I felt like I was going to Ernest Hemingway's 100th birthday party!! I signed up and hopped a plane to Chicago.
The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park sponsored this extravaganza, which included festivities of all sorts in Hemingway's hometown; concerts in the park, a play written by Hemingway's daughter-in-law, and commemorative dinners and parties. The celebration continued throughout the month of July, but the literary conference itself took place from July 18th through the 21st". Most who attended the conference belonged to the academic world, with many presenting papers on their own areas of expertise. Since I'm most fascinated with his "Moveable Feast" period and the personalities who surrounded him in those days, I
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gravitated toward any presentation with the word, "Paris" or "Expatriates" in it.
Presentations took us through time from Hemingway's earliest days in Oak Park to periods spent in Europe, Cuba and Florida, starting with those stories about his mother dressing him like a girl. "All the children were dressed like that in those days"..."His mother damaged his psyche"...etc. Opinions differed.
Detailed papers with titles like "The Hemingway/Faulkner Generation", "A Matter of Pedagogy: Hemingway and Gertrude Stein" and "The Hemingway Hero as Hemingway Autobiography, Authorship and the Art of Fiction" brought the conference through his youth, adulthood and late adulthood. Some were fascinating, like Hilary Justice's "Alias Grace: Music and the Art of Ernest Hemingway", where she compared Hemingway's writing to various classical music forms. Some papers were dull. Some suffered from their writer's arrogance. One presenter was so unprepared, he reminded me of some awful grad school presentations I've witnessed.
What made the deepest impression? I think it was the depth and variety of topics inspired by one man.
See OAK PARK, page 15
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