From the Small World file…
    Enrico Caruso…
    Teddy Roosevelt…
    and Oklahoma rough boys

Hemingway’s earliest works were made public in 1923 in a controversial underground magazine, The Little Review, published by Margaret Anderson and her lover, Jane Heap, in Paris.

Margaret and Jane’s little magazine also took a chance on publishing the earliest works of James Joyce. As a result, the United States Post Office seized and destroyed the magazines and the 2 women were charged with obscenity. Found guilty, they were fined $50.

This paperback pamphlet is the first Hemingway “book.” Its existence is owed in part to the exposure given to his work by Margaret and Jane. The book’s publisher, Robert McAlmon, allowed Hemingway only 4 author’s copies and Hemingway’s finances at the time did not allow him to buy more. This copy is inscribed to Margaret and Jane. It recently sold at auction for $60,000. 

When word reached Hemingway in 1941 that Margaret was unable to afford the ticket for the ocean passage home to America, he sent a check for $400 to her friend Solita Solano with a note:

“Here is the check for Margaret. I hope so much that she has good luck getting over. Greet her for me will you? … Much love Solita and take good care of yourself and don’t ever worry because as long as any of us have any money we all have money.”

It was on that ocean voyage to the U.S. that Margaret met Dorothy Caruso, widow of the internationally-acclaimed Italian tenor Enrico Caruso. They fell in love and spent the next 13 years together until Dorothy’s death in 1955, after which Margaret returned back to France.

# # # # 

Look closely at the cover and you’ll see “Oklahoma” and “Roosevelt,” the titles of two of Hemingway’s poems. 

These are examples of obscenity in 1923:
 

OKLAHOMA
by Ernest Hemingway

All of the Indians are dead
(A good Indian is a dead Indian)
Or riding in motor cars—
(the oil lands, you know, they’re all rich)
Smoke smarts my eyes,
Cottonwood twigs and buffalo dung
Smoke grey in the teepee—
(Or is it myopic trachoma)

The prairies are long,
The moon rises,
Ponies
Drag at their pickets.
The grass has gone brown in the summer—
(or is the hay crop failing)

Pull an arrow out:
If you break it
The wound closes.
Salt is good too
And wood ashes.
Pounding it throbs in the night—
(or is it the gonorrhea)

ROOSEVELT
by Ernest Hemingway
 

Workingmen believed
He busted trusts,
And put his picture in their windows.
“What he’d have done in France!”
They said.
Perhaps he would—
He could have died
Perhaps,
Though generals rarely die except in bed,
As he did finally.
And all the legends that he started in his life
Live on and prosper,
Unhampered now by his existence.

Hemingway may have thought Teddy was overrated,
but the Wizard likes the Tedster anyway. Just sayin’.
Brian Keith portrays Teddy Roosevelt in The Wind and The Lion, (1975,) a tremendous film if you like Teddy. In this segment, Roosevelt talks about Grizzly bears and Americans.
Worth watchin’. – Indy