Evanston: a writer and an architect
Evanston: a writer and an architect
An architect and a writer, who lived in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago, drove fifteen miles to Oak Park, a suburb west of Chicago, to see the homes of an architect and a writer. The writer had not thought of it in those terms until the architect mentioned it on their way back.
For the first decade of the Twentieth Century, the most famous American architect of the century and the most famous American writer of the century lived near one another in Oak Park.
One hundred years ago, Frank Lloyd Wright was forty years old and Ernest Hemingway soon to be eight. The elementary school young Ernest attended was diagonally across the street from Wright’s studio (in the top picture above) and the home in which he lived through high school (lower picture above) was two blocks away.
Today there is more evidence of Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park than of Hemingway. Wright did some of his best work there and left behind buildings, while Hemingway was a child and left behind only memories. For Ernest himself they were not good memories. He said of Oak Park that it had “wide leafy streets and narrow minds.” However Oak Park has forgiven him and there is a Hemingway Museum, as well as plaques outside both the house in which he grew up and the one, also nearby, in which he was born.
There is, of course, a cottage industry in both famous men, with tours and souvenirs.
In the town Visitors Center there are several photographs of Hemingway’s teen age days at Oak Park High School, from which he graduated in 1917, and his experiences as a volunteer ambulance driver in Italy, where he was wounded by a mortar shell and machine gun fire.
While hospitalized he fell in love with an American nurse, some six or seven years older than he, and a copy of the letter she sent him ending the affair after he returned to Oak Park is also on display. She makes reference to the difference between their ages and refers to him as “a kid.”
It is suggested that he may have been more wounded by the letter than the mortar.
That evening, over gin and tonics back in their Evanston condo, the writer asked the architect if when young she had wanted to be as great an architect as Frank Lloyd Wright. She said that she had, but she soon learned the business realities of architecture and so had worked for others.
She asked if Hemingway had influenced the writer.
When he was young, he had admired Hemingway and had certainly dreamed of a career as successful. He had even expected it. He had lived the life, written truly about what he knew, and never compromised.
The writer admired Hemingway less now than he had when young and doubted he would ever again read any of the novels, except possibly THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA. He did like some of the short stories and many of Hemingway’s early pieces of journalism, published in a book called BYLINE ERNEST HEMINGWAY. Thinking of the letter from the nurse, he found Hemingway’s writing about sex inept; but then sex is very difficult to write about in English where the relevant vocabulary is too clinical or too pornographic.
The architect’s compromise made the writer’s unexpected old age more comfortable than it otherwise would have been, for he had not made much money. But comfort had never been one of his values, and he would still give anything to have his words last as Hemingway’s.
Monday, July 2, 2007