She was haunted by Hemingway

CHICAGO -- He’s at it again. He won’t leave me alone. Can you file a restraining order against an author who’s been dead for 46 years?

Probably not, you say? Rotten luck.

Then I’ll just have to find some other way of persuading Ernest Hemingway to get out of my head, to move along, to find some other poor soul to bother. Ignoring him doesn’t work. Hemingway’s stubborn ghost just hangs around, sporting a slight smile on that broad, handsome face, a smile that tends to drift toward a know-it-all smirk. His fists are usually planted on his hips and his feet are spread wide apart, as if he’s bracing for impact from an onrushing linebacker -- or maybe just a disgruntled literary critic.

Why can’t I simply ignore him? There are plenty of writers adored by other readers but not by me, and I’m not in the least troubled. Those writers don’t stick around. They know when to scram. They go their way and I go mine, and everybody’s happy.

But Hemingway, the Oak Park, Ill., native whose prose is so clipped and monosyllabic that you could send it verbatim as a text message and not strain your thumbs, won’t go away. He can’t take a hint.

Many times, when I get to the end of a sentence written by somebody else, he’s waiting. He stands there, smirking and superior, and darned if he isn’t scoffing. I could write it better, the ghost of Hemingway gloats. I could write it cleaner and truer.

David H. Krause is no ghostbuster. His title is much more specific and down to earth: He’s associate provost and associate vice president for academic affairs at Dominican University in River Forest, Ill. Yet he’s helped me come to terms with my Hemingway fixation.

This week, Krause started teaching a six-week course on Hemingway. It’s a project co-sponsored by the university, the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park and the Newberry Library, and here’s the twist: The class meets in the house in which Hemingway was born in 1899. The structure in Oak Park, nine miles west of downtown Chicago, is open to the public as a Hemingway museum and is a unique setting for regular conversations about the author, Krause says.

“The more time I spend in his birthplace home, the better I understand the architecture of Hemingway’s imagination,” he explains. “This is the place where a worldview began to take shape.”

Hemingway’s family moved into a second house in Oak Park -- that one also is owned by the Hemingway Foundation -- when the author was 7. He lived there throughout his boyhood.

When he left, he went out into the world and became among the best-known and most-celebrated -- and surely the most widely imitated -- authors of the 20th century, as famous for his rugged exploits and outsize personality as for his numerous novels and taciturn short stories.

To prepare for my talk with Krause about his site-specific course and why he dreamed it up, I re-read a passel of Hemingway works such as “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940), his long, deliberate novel about the Spanish Civil War, and “In Our Time” (1925), the short-story collection that constitutes Hemingway’s first American publication and includes such classics as “Indian Camp,” “The Three Day Blow” and “Soldier’s Home.”

Curiously, unexpectedly, amid my dutiful re-examination of Hemingway’s puny paragraphs and stripped-down sentences, I began rather to . . . like them. And to wonder why I’d been so hostile to him in the first place.

It is not, as some people suggest, because of his biography. Hemingway was not especially enlightened when it came to women’s equality, and he left behind a trail of broken marriages and damaged children. He could be moody and difficult. He blew through friendships right and left.

But so what? We don’t have to invite him to brunch. We only have to read him -- and reading him, after not reading him for a good long while, is a revelation. Habits I had detested before -- the skimpy descriptions, the stingy dialogue, the undernourished plots -- struck me this time around as honest and forthright. His style isn’t showy or pretty. It does its job. It stands in wild contrast to the style of authors such as Henry James or Jane Austen or John Irving or Virginia Woolf. They pile up the words almost as if they want to keep life at bay; he picks one or two words that work for him and leaves it at that.

Maybe I just had to live my way into getting Hemingway. Maybe I had to be more mature before I could appreciate his words -- words that argue, in their own laconic way, that words don’t make much difference, that in the end we never really understand one another anyway, no matter how hard we try.

“Hemingway was never a personal passion of mine either -- not like William Faulkner or Toni Morrison,” says Krause, who joined the Dominican staff in August after eight years at Columbia College Chicago.

But then he began to teach Hemingway’s works and discovered how they appealed to students.

“There’s this surface accessibility, but there’s also this sense of, ‘OK, I get that, but there’s something not being said.’ There is enough that’s puzzling and complicated that it helps students learn to read better.”

And reading him in the house in which he was born is a thrill, he says. It’s a way of linking an international literary superstar with the tree-lined suburban street down which he once walked. “Hemingway,” Krause adds, “was a person who, from this little village of Oak Park, engaged the world.”

Hemingway, heaven knows, doesn’t need my imprimatur to be considered a great author. He’s a consensus pick by all sorts of smart, discriminating people, people such as Krause and the 15 students in his class.

But it’s nice to know that you can go back to an author you had dismissed and dig through your own prejudices and snap judgments and muddled misreadings and unearth a kind of tragic, abbreviated beauty.

So to the burly, white-bearded ghost of Hemingway, I say this: You’ve made your point. You can go home now.

They’ve left the lights on at 339 N. Oak Park Ave.