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.