The Irony of Being Ernest in Oak Park -- part II
Assignment 52 -- Home Town Tourist Attractions -- World War I Memorial, in Scoville Park, Oak Park, IL, a few blocks south of the Hemingway Birthplace
When this monument was dedicated, in 1925, Hemingway was already in Paris, living the cafe expatriate life, married to his first wife Hadley Richardson, and working on his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, published the following year.
But his war experiences shaped much of his fiction and also his world view. He was hardly out of high school, when he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I. After he was severely wounded, he returned to Oak Park to recuperate. And decades later, during the Spanish Civil War and World War II, he worked as a journalist in combat zones.
Here are a few of the things he had to say about war:
--World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that had ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied. So the writers either wrote propaganda, or shut up, or fought.
--Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
--No catalogue of horrors ever kept man from war. Before the war, you always think that it's not you who will die... In modern war, there is nothing sweet or fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
The Irony of Being Ernest in Oak Park -- part II
Assignment 52 -- Home Town Tourist Attractions -- World War I Memorial, in Scoville Park, Oak Park, IL, a few blocks south of the Hemingway Birthplace
When this monument was dedicated, in 1925, Hemingway was already in Paris, living the cafe expatriate life, married to his first wife Hadley Richardson, and working on his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, published the following year.
But his war experiences shaped much of his fiction and also his world view. He was hardly out of high school, when he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I. After he was severely wounded, he returned to Oak Park to recuperate. And decades later, during the Spanish Civil War and World War II, he worked as a journalist in combat zones.
Here are a few of the things he had to say about war:
--World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that had ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied. So the writers either wrote propaganda, or shut up, or fought.
--Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
--No catalogue of horrors ever kept man from war. Before the war, you always think that it's not you who will die... In modern war, there is nothing sweet or fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.