Journal of Literature and Art Studies, January 2021, Vol. 11, No. 1, 62-70 doi: 10.17265/2159-5836/2021.01.010 D DAVID PUBLISHING

Covers and Contents: Why iot is a Marvelous Work of Art

Peter L. Hays University of California, Davis, USA  iot (1924) was a remarkable artistic achievement. Following collages in the works of Picasso, Braque, and Gris, publisher Bill Bird created a collage of newspaper headlines on the cover of that slim volume that linked to the collage of vignettes within that Hemingway wrote. Both depicted a world losing traditional values, torn by war and despair and increasing commercialism. Subsequent Hemingway book covers by Scribners, at least until The Old Man and the Sea, emphasized sales over art and had little to do with content.

Keywords: Hemingway, iot, collage, modernist art

Introduction The cover of Ernest Hemingway’s 1924 in our time—behind the lower-case title, lower-case author’s name, publisher’s colophon, and lower-case press name—is a collage of newspaper snippets.1 Only 170 copies of the book survived pristine printing on handmade Rives paper, of the 300 planned, with 120 having the watermark of the paper appear under the frontispiece. 1924 was an advanced year for Cubist collages by Picasso and Braque, both of whom incorporated bits of printed material, often newspapers, into their works of art (“collage” from the French for “to glue”). Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning (1911-12) features imitation chaircaning on oilcloth surrounded by a frame of actual rope, and on the chair caning one can read the letters J.O.U., which can be a pun on jouer, to play, which both artists were doing with their collages. But it is also probably an abbreviated “journal,” since pasted bits of newspaper were common in their collages, incorporating jour, day, insisting on the art’s temporality, it’s here-to-dayness. A year later Braque’s Le Courier employed the masthead of that newspaper, along with a tobacco wrapper and a stamp, and Picasso’s La Suze (1912-13) included whole newspaper columns. These objects insisted on their realness—that they were not the figments of a painter’s imagination but had real-world, quotidian existence. Both painters wanted very much to break with the past, especially the oversized paintings that idealized historical or mythological figures in equally idealized settings. Hemingway, similarly, wanted to overcome his predecessors’ Victorian sentimentality, their unwillingness to publish certain words, certain basic human acts (as in the inaccroachable “Up in Michigan”), the hard facts of life, love, and, especially, death. The title of in our time comes with irony from the Anglican Book of Prayer’s “give us peace in our time, oh Lord.” And the veteran of World War One, the reporter who covered the Greco-Turkish War, the son who had witnessed tension in his household, when his mother would leave the familial battlefield to go to her bedroom, saying she had a sick headache (Reynolds, 1986, p. 86; Hemingway,

Peter L. Hays, Professor Emeritus, English Department, University of California, Davis. 1 Picture from The Hemingway Review, 38:2 (Spring 2019), p. 12, from a copy of the book in the Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. COVERS AND CONTENTS: WHY IOT IS A MARVELOUS WORK OF ART 63

1973, pp. 64, 79, 90), or when his father left Oak Park entirely for days in order to rest his nerves (Reynolds, 1986, p. 83), knew in 1924 there was no peace, neither on the international, public scale nor the private, domestic one. As the character Littless says in “The Last Good Country,” “Haven’t we seen enough fights in families?” (Hemingway, 1973, p. 70). But beyond the cover’s collage, Hemingway’s vignettes themselves represented something new and different, as well as a collage of settings and characters, of which more later.

Figure 1. Cover of iot, 1924.

The snippets of newspaper ads and stories on the cover of in our time were originally intended to frame each individual brief vignette, which would otherwise be alone on the page surrounded by white space.2 Bill Bird, the publisher, wrote to Ezra Pound, about “framing each piece in a border of newspaper print ‘carefully selected (a) as decoration (b) as illustration’” (Hemingway, 2013, p. 60, n.7). Pound included Bird’s letter to Hemingway and asked for his approval or disapproval. Hemingway cabled Bird his acceptance of the design of “the newsprint borders…. It is a good hunch” (ibid., p. 59). But that did not happen, with each vignette now appearing unframed

2 Most of the headlines come from newspapers of December 1923, primarily the New York Herald and the Chicago Tribune. 64 COVERS AND CONTENTS: WHY IOT IS A MARVELOUS WORK OF ART on separate pages. The cover’s collage, however, is remarkably illustrative, although none of the few reviewers at the time seem to have noticed that Bird included on the cover newspaper headlines he had intended for the individual vignettes; the connections are quite clear. In line with Hemingway’s accounts, both journalistic and fictional, of the evacuation of Christians from Anatolia into Thrace and Bulgaria during the Greco-Turkish War just a year before publication, there is a headline, directly under the date of the volume, saying “Balkan Queen.” The rest of the headline is obscured, but seems to be saying that she is working, perhaps to maintain the fragile peace in that area, one which had seen several wars in the region, against the Ottoman empire, Bulgaria against Serbia, both before World War I and the Greco-Turkish war following it. “Balkan Queen” relates both to the retreat from Anatolia into Thrace that we now know in 1925’s In Our Time as Chapter II, and the final vignette about the Greek king. One headline announces that someone is leaving America, another announces an “Common Malady Is Found Serious,” reminding readers of the Spanish flu of 1918-19. The headline “Spanish Revolt Frustrated” appears over Hemingway’s name, again echoing the political upheavals of the time, the military coup of Primo de Rivera in September of 1923 that led to his inept dictatorship, and ultimately the Spanish Civil War of the next decade. Below that is a headline, “Funds from Moscow”—to whom and for what not included. Again, Moscow probably did supply funds for Communist organizing throughout Europe, a theme of “The Revolutionist,” one of the chapters in in our time, as it also did for the Republic during the Spanish Civil War. Interestingly, above “time” in the title is an article printed in Cyrillic, tying it to Russia. One ad seems to promise $3 to $10 from God, possibly a conflation of two separate advertisements, but there is a headline of a regular newspaper column by William Jennings Bryan promising “Guidance from God,” a continuation of the religious pieties that Hemingway was rebelling against, as portrayed in the vignette of the soldier praying to be saved from shelling (Chapter 8 in iot, Chapter 7 in IOT), as well as in “Soldier’s Home.” Bryan was three-time Democratic nominee for president, most recently in 1908, and in the year following the publication of in our time he would be involved in the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee; that involvement and his death would be mentioned in The Sun Also Rises. Immediately left of the publisher’s colophon is the all-caps “Learn French” in red print, apt since the book was published in Paris and Hemingway was indeed learning French, as were many of the expatriates. Also in red was “Ritz Carlton,” most likely an ad for the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain, founded early in the 20th century by César Ritz. Its line of luxury hotels did not then include the Paris Ritz, which Hemingway could not afford to stay at but certainly knew about and which he claimed he liberated from the Nazis in 1944 (Baker, 1969, p. 417). It did include other hotels in Europe, such as the Grand Hotel in Rapallo, which he did not stay at when he visited Pound in 1923 before going to Toronto for the birth of first son Bumby; and the Grand Hôtel et des Iles Borromées in Stresa, which Ernest visited but could not afford while recuperating from his wound in 1918 (Baker, 1969, p. 51), but Lt. Henry can and does stay there with Catherine in A Farewell to Arms (p. 244). There is also an ad for Smile A While, either for a toothpaste or it’s taken from the line “Smile the while you kiss me sad adieu,” in Richard Whiting’s song 1918 “Till We Meet Again,” an appropriate song for soldiers departing to World War I. We are told that silent film actress Norma Talmadge has turned down a role about Versailles; whether the peace treaty signed there to end World War I or the historical palace, the snippet does not reveal. Another headline indicates that Princess Matchabelli and Lady Diana will alternate in the role of the COVERS AND CONTENTS: WHY IOT IS A MARVELOUS WORK OF ART 65

Madonna in Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle, which was revived in New York, on Broadway in 1923, religious devotion being appropriated by spectacle and advanced social status. The headline about the Balkans insists on the peninsula’s bloody history, war after war. No peace there in that time, or more recently in ours. The ads also point to an increasingly consumer culture—toothpaste, and beer ads—leaving behind the production culture of the nineteenth century, ironically appearing on a hand-printed book made up with hand-made paper. The headline about W.E. Corey leaving America and considering living in France acknowledges the expatriate community then living in Paris, and the hordes of tourists arriving daily, as does the headline that tells us that “Businessmen Want Pleasure, Not Study,” a timely accompaniment to the Roaring Twenties and speakeasy gin, as well as the numerous businessmen fleeing Prohibition as they visited Paris, as the headline “More Americans Arrive in Paris” announces. 400,000 visited in 1925 (McAuliffe, 2016, p. 21), and there were 32,000 Americans living in Paris in 1923 (ibid., p. 22). Would they learn French; would they integrate into the community? Another headline, in French, tells us that the dollar helps the franc, possibly also from the tourists and the expatriate community.The exchange rate favored American with dollars, who could live cheaply, as Hemingway did, initially. Another headline celebrates a 104-year-old voter, who “Drinks Liquor Since Boyhood,” an obvious swipe at the 18th Amendment and Prohibition, appearing in an ad for Koppel Bier. In short, the collage on the cover of iot represents a snapshot of life worldwide in December of 1923, as the vignettes within present their own snapshots of life, far removed from Victorian niceties, and much more mixed in setting, time, and characters than Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), his collection of stories about a fictional Ohio town. Hemingway gives us refugees from the Greco-Turkish War after a statement by a French kitchen corporal in World War I; they are followed by British soldiers at Mons, and still later by Spanish bullfighters, American criminals, and a Greek king. Setting, time, dialect, all different; only reality and theme unite. The cover’s colophon itself, a stylistic rendering of Paris’s three mountains3 for Bill Bird’s Three Mountains Press, adds an art work to the clearly legible print, together with its Latin version of Psalms 121, “I lift up mine eyes to the hills” (“Levavi oculos meos im montes”), a reminder of Hemingway’s religious household and an echo of the Bryan headline below it. Another headline announces that someone got a “Year in Prison For Birth Control Ad,” and others were “Barred from Film on Obstetrics”; sexual freedom and medical knowledge were pushing against Victorian prudish boundaries, as Hemingway was, with Gertrude Stein deeming “Up in Michigan” inaccrochable (of a painting, unable to be displayed) and Liveright denying its publication in the 1925 In Our Time. There is a headline to a story in Spanish about matador Nicanor Villalta, which relates to the bullfighting vignettes in in our time; it also echoes the middle name of Bumby—John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway—born the year before (Baker, 1969, p. 117). In short, the cover is a microcosm of the day: art, war, commerce, and personal; it captures in many ways Hemingway’s themes in the book. Bird chose well, illustrating the stories within the volume and the confused, often self-contradictory times.

3 The three mountains are Montparnasse, Montagne Ste. Geneviève, and Montmartre. Hemingway adopted the three-mountain logo for his silverware at the Finca. Below the three mountains is a stylized Ojibwe arrowhead and bars (according to Cortanze) representing the honorary captains’ rank both Ernest and Mary wore as correspondents during WWII. Photo at end of this article, Figure 5, By Jean-Bernard Naudin in Cortanze’s book, p. 67. With thanks to the incomparable Susan Beegel for referring me to this book. 66 COVERS AND CONTENTS: WHY IOT IS A MARVELOUS WORK OF ART

It also anticipates John Dos Passos’ artistic efforts in U.S.A., with its Newsreels, capturing events of the day, and the Camera Eye recording private happenings, along with prose poem biographies of noted individuals, all interspersing Dos Passos’ narrative—a verbal collage of the same era. It also anticipates Hemingway’s own design for To Have and Have Not, a design he abandoned to finish the novel early in order to witness the Spanish Civil War at first hand. Like Dos Passos’ Newsreels, Hemingway intended “to alternate [newpaper accounts] of revolutionary violence and Batista atrocities with Key West chapters (Reynolds, 1997, p. 241), another verbal collage, but not one carried out. The lower-case title, like e.e.cummings’ insistent use of lower case, was a familiar modernist stratagem. Edmund Wilson criticized its use for in our time, saying “This device, which used to be rather effective when the modernists first used it to call attention to the fact that they had something new to offer, has now grown common and a bore” (quoted in Hemingway, 2013, p. 167). Hemingway wrote Wilson that the lower-case title was Bill Bird’s doing: “[A]bout the the lack of capital letters—which seemed very silly and affected to me—but Bird had put them in and as he was printing the In Our Time himself and that was all the fun he was getting out of it I thought he could go ahead and be a damn fool in his own way if it pleased him” (ibid., pp. 165-166). Of course, Hemingway often shaped his letters to conform to their receivers. But he had no criticism of the collage of newspaper headlines and articles in his letters, and in his letters, as above, he consistently capitalizes “In Our Time.” All of this we get from the cover: modernism as demonstrated by visual and verbal collage of different size headlines, insistent lower case, different languages, and different typefaces. It is Bill Bird’s collage, as with Picasso and Braque, a collection of newsprint glued to another work of art, in this case, a book of Hemingway’s short fiction. Even the stories themselves are presented as works of art, spare paragraphs surrounded by creamy white space on the handmade paper, unlike usual books of stories, where words crowd the page up to all four margins. But Hemingway’s short fiction is also a collage. There are stories of World War I, of the Greco-Turkish War, particularly its after-math—the resettlement of refugees, the vindictive execution of government ministers, and the state of the former king—but also stories of bullfighting, of one Communist organizer, and of the administration of executions in the United States, by the police and by the state, with priests in attendance. And the narrative voice shifts into different dialects: standard American, slang American, and British. The cover’s headlines often refer to the contents of the volume, brief stories about trauma and loss: war with its deaths, woundings, and loss of life and personal freedom; loss of love, execution of criminals by both police and a hangman; loss of control and life by a gored bullfighter; loss of illusion and freedom by a jailed revolutionist. Bird had wanted to frame each vignette with an appropriate frame of newsprint, using bullfight journals for the matador chapters, “something from Athens for the Greek king in his garden” (Reynolds, 1989, p. 151). And like Cubist technique, which insisted on repeating multiple sharply etched facets, each only slightly different from those surrounding it, so Hemingway repeated certain words throughout each chapter, “six” and “rain” in the chapter on the execution of the cabinet ministers, or verbal ironies as opposed to visual puns of the Cubist painters,4 such as when Hemingway uses the British slang term “potted,” to kill, in a

4 Cf. Vaughn: “Hemingway also adapts Picasso’s technique of repeating geometrical forms in his paintings by repeating words and phrases in his text” (5). Thus, Hemingway’s verbal repetitions come from other sources, such as the Bible, and not just from Gertrude Stein. COVERS AND CONTENTS: WHY IOT IS A MARVELOUS WORK OF ART 67 chapter which takes place in a garden. Murder in a garden, excution against a hospital wall—verbal irony replaces the visual ironies of Picasso, Braque, and Juan Gris, where printed objects are painted, such as the book beneath the pasted-on pages of a detective novel in Gris’s “The Table” (1919), while wallpaper and newspaper clippings are pasted on, below a headline that reads “LE VRAI ET LE FAUX”: the true and the false; is it real, or is is trompe l’oeil? And more particularly, what in this world is real? The collage of vignettes testifies to what F. Scott Fitzgerald had published four years before in This Side of Paradise: “a new generation… grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken….” (Fitzgerald, 1920, p. 282). in our time’s cover is in sharp contrast to Hemingway’s commercially published work, first by Boni and Liveright in 1925,5 and then by Scribners. Both The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms (as well as their 1930 In Our Time)6 feature covers of pastoral Greek scenes by Cleonika Damianakes, who signed all three covers as “Cleon”; her signature is visible on both. Charles Scribner III interprets the Farewell to Arms cover as a warrior with a broken sword in his left hand, beside a sleeping angel of death.7

5 Boni and Liveright’s 1925 In Our Time featured a cover divided into nine rectangles. The top three blocks featured a small design at each corner and a blurb in the center panel by short story anthologist Edward J. O’Brien. The central panel of the nine announced the title and the author, all in caps of varying sizes. The remaining five rectangles also featured encomia by Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank, Donald Ogden Stuart, Gilbert Seldes, and Ford Madox Ford. No collage, no tributes to modernism in lower-case titles, just heavy-handed marketing. 6 Cleon’s cover for Scribner’s 1930 edition of In Our Time featured two classical heads, male and female, leaning together tenderly, framed by a grapevine, largely inappropriate for the book, which featured not only the original vignettes, where no love was depicted (“A Very Short Story” coming closest), but also now the short stories of the Indian husband’s suicide in “Indian Camp,” the strained relationships of marital couples in “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” “Cat in the Rain,” and “Out of Season,” and Nick’s and Marge’s breakup in “The End of Something,” as well as women unaccompanied by their spouses giving birth alone in “On the Quai at Smyrna”—never two head touching romantically. Vol. 4 of Hemingway’s Letters makes no mention of this cover, other than the note that Cleon designed no additional covers for Hemingway’s work (115, n. 3). 7 Email from Dr. Scribner to author, December 21, 2019. 68 COVERS AND CONTENTS: WHY IOT IS A MARVELOUS WORK OF ART

Figure 2. Scribner’s cover by Cleon. Figure 3. Daniel Chester French’s Death and the Wounded Soldier.8

As such, Cleon’s art for Farewell to Arms does refer to the contents of the book, a warrior who has left the battle, the cessation of the individual’s war, the farewell to arms, beside the figure of death, which features prominently in the novel’s war-torn landscape and even in a hospital room. Few, I think, would associate the nude female figure with the angel of death. Dr. Scribner (he has a Ph.D. from Princeton on art history) compares it to Daniel Chester French’s magnificent WW1 memorial, which was erected at his boarding high school in New Hampshire, St. Paul’s School, to honor those who had given their lives in the First World War. Notice the sword hilt held by the dead warrior, his youth commemorating those who had gone from the high school directly into battle and then losing their lives. The red flowers on Cleon’s cover, reminiscent of red poppies, could also be schematic poinsettias, says Scribner, representing the blood of Christ. The case Dr. Scribner makes for the cover of The Sun Also Rises is much less convincing.

[T]he SAR [cover]in my art-historical view conjures up the iconography of the garden of the Hesperides, with the golden apple of Immortality. I can see several poetic applications, both apt and ironic, to this youthful novel of The Lost Generation. Also to the source of its title from Ecclesiastes.

8 French also sculpted the Minuteman statue in Concord, Massachusetts, and Washington D.C.’s Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial. COVERS AND CONTENTS: WHY IOT IS A MARVELOUS WORK OF ART 69

Figure 4. Scribner’s and Cleon’s cover for The Sun Also Rises.

While some readers of Farewell to Arms in 1929 may have had sufficient classical training to see an angel of death and a wounded warrior with a broken sword, thus appropriate for the novel they were about to read, I doubt few would connect the Golden Apples of Hesperides, with their promise of immortality, to the Lost Generation and a novel about drunks in Paris and Pamplona. Michael Thurston was thus correct in his recent article about in our time. The cover directly links to the content of the Chapters, making it a work of art itself as a collage. But even the pages make the whole book a work of art with their isolated printings of brief vignettes as prose poems, and the stories themselves make a verbal collage of different countries, different wars, different dialects, different events.

Conclusion Like the infinity loop or the Greek ouroboros, the cover of iot relates to the stories within, and the stories reflect the cover. in our time as a whole was a coherent work of art that no subsequent volume, with covers designed solely for marketing, ever equaled.

70 COVERS AND CONTENTS: WHY IOT IS A MARVELOUS WORK OF ART

Figure 5. The Hemingway silverware, engraved with “H,” 3 mountains, bars, and an arrowhead.

References Baker, C. (1969). Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribners. de Cortanze, G. (1997). Hemingway in Cuba. Vanves, France: Éditions du Chêne. Dos Passos, J. (1930, 1958). U.S.A. New York: New American Library. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1920, 1960). This Side of Paradise. New York: Scribners. Hemingway, E. (1924, 1925). In Our Time. Paris: Three Mountains Press. Hemingway, E. (1926). The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribners. Hemingway, E. (1929, 1956). A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribners. Hemingway, E. (1937). To Have and Have Not. New York: Scribners. Hemingway, E. (1973). The Nick Adams Stories. P. Young (Ed.). New York: Bantam. Hemingway, E. (2013). The Letters of Ernest Hemingway (Vol. 2, 1923-1925). S. Spanier, A. DeFazio III, and R. W. Trogdon (Eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hemingway, E. (2019). The Letters of Ernest Hemingway (Vol 4 1929-1931). S. Spanier and M. Mandel (Eds.). Cambrudge: Cambridge UP. McAuliffe, M. (2016). When Paris Sizzled. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Reynolds, M. (1989). Hemingway: The Paris Years. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Reynolds, M. (1986). The Young Hemingway. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Reynolds, M. (1997). Hemingway, the 1930s. New York: Norton. Thurston, M. (2019). Reading the paper: A bibliographic approach to Hemingway’s in our time. The Hemingway Review, 38(2), 9-26. Vaughn, E. D. (1994). In Our Time and Picasso. In K. Rosen (Ed.), Hemingway Repossessed. Westport: Praeger.