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"'Drive,' he said": how Ted Brumback helped steer Ernest Hemingway into war and writing.

Article Excerpt
Ernest Hemingway's apprenticeship at The Kansas City Star gave him writing skills and a few lasting friendships. One friend, Theodore B. Brumback, has long been recognized for his contributions to Hemingway's life story. When they met in November 1917, Brumback had just returned to Kansas City after five months driving ambulances in France. A few months later, he and Hemingway left the newspaper together to join the ambulance service in Italy. For information about the friendship, Hemingway scholars have long relied on a colorful story Brumback published in The Star in 1936. But Brumback left a longer paper trail, including accounts of his wartime service published in 1917-18. These pieces offer a new perspective on Brumback's influence on Hemingway.

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A MONTH AFTER HE BEGAN WORKING at The Kansas City Star in 1917, Ernest Hemingway befriended a new arrival in the newsroom, a man who would help steer his course in the coming months. Theodore B. Brumback, four years older, had just returned to Kansas City after five months driving an ambulance in the war zones of France. Hemingway and Brumback would share many things in common over the years--including tough, life-changing experiences. But at the moment, the 18-year-old Hemingway was typing furiously. His keys jammed but he plowed right through it. And soon he called the copy boy to deliver his fresh story to the city desk (Brumback, "With Hemingway"; Fenton 47-48).

"That's rotten looking copy," Hemingway, a seasoned newsman now with four weeks of gritty city life under his belt, told Brumback. "When I get a little excited this damn type mill goes haywire on me." Hemingway stood up and offered his hand (Brumback "With Hemingway"; Fenton 47-48).

Brumback was twenty-two, a tall scion of Kansas City society. His father was a judge. He'd spent three years at Cornell and dropped out after an errant golf ball bounced off a tree and back into his face. He wore a glass eye. The wound didn't seem to suppress his spirit.

Brumback was supposed to be home on a month's furlough. Although previous accounts suggest that Brumback had joined the newspaper's staff, it's possible, as one contemporary recalled it, that his first encounter with Hemingway was in an interview (Wilson). (1) On 17 November 1917, the day of Brumback's return, The Star published a front-page story--"Brumback Home From France/ A Short Furlough After Five Months in Ambulance Service." Hemingway may have been the author.

[ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED]

If so, that single story would represent an intriguing addition to the body of Hemingway articles identified over the years from his six-and-a-half months at The Star. Even if Hemingway was not the author, the story has importance as one of several previously unacknowledged accounts of Brumback's ambulance service. In addition to this interview, Brumback's own narratives in The Star--including a published letter from the front, a luncheon speech, and a finely honed, 4,000word tale---could have influenced the young Hemingway as he imagined and went on to create his own future.

Brumback had gone to France in July 1917. He served in the No. 66 section of the American Field Service. The unit was stationed opposite German troops behind the Craonne sector, "one of the hottest fighting districts along the front," according to the interview. "There are three thousand Americans in the ambulance service," Brumback said. "The forty-four men in our section one day brought back fifteen hundred wounded men. We were seldom that busy, however, and sometimes for a day or two we would have practically no work" ("Brumback Home").

Brumback told the interviewer that the ambulance headquarters squatted along the Aisne River, about four miles back of the line. Guns could reach it easily. "Wounded men were hauled in motor ambulances about five miles" the article explained, "where other ambulances picked them up and carried them to base hospitals. In quiet times ambulance drivers work two days at the front, then spend four days in the rear. During an attack they work continuously" ("Brumback Home"). The story ended with an inventory of Brumback's souvenirs: "a hand grenade, a trench bomb and several pieces of shrapnel, one of which fell in his ambulance" ("Brumback Home"). Two days later, the newspaper followed up with one-column line cuts of Brumback and the seven-inch bomb (shown at "Two-Thirds Actual Size") ("'Ted' Brumback and a Trench Bomb").

In addition to that front page story and the illustrated follow-up in November, at least three more accounts of Brumback's wartime experience in France appeared in The Kansas City Star in 1917 and 1918. These early newspaper pieces, published during the heat of the war and during Hemingway's apprenticeship in Kansas City, offer an opportunity to see something new about the fertile ground from which Hemingway the writer sprouted.

In light of the older man's influence on the budding writer, each of the Brumback stories is worth considering at length. You can hear Brumback's voice in these articles, the diction of his tales as he talks about fear and bombs and the duty of hauling the wounded while artillery shells whiz by. Brumback's stories may have influenced Hemingway years later as he wrote about the war in "Now I Lay Me," "In Another Country," and A Farewell to Arms. And his one-eyed friend may have been an early model for Hemingway's wounded heroes.

Brumback almost certainly helped shape Hemingway's attitude toward his future. When they first met, Hemingway was already eager to go to war somehow, some way. "Honest kid I cant stay out much longer," he told his sister Marcelline in a letter written on 6 November 1917, just three weeks after his arrival in Kansas City and less than two weeks before his first encounter with Brumback (qtd. in Sanford 270-271). Within months the two young men would head out together to drive ambulances (or pitch canteen cigarettes) in Italy. For now, Hemingway could absorb from Brumback an idea of the physical routines and dangers, and an understanding of war as a subject to observe and write about with spark and detail.

Brumback's first narrative had appeared in The Starback in August 1917, while Hemingway was summering in Michigan and still trying to decide what to do in the...

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