Ernest Hemingway Museum

Having resigned ourselves to giving up any hope of enjoyable sightseeing in Chicago, we consulted Thelma for suggestions on suitable entertainment. I was still slightly scarred by her failure in Minneapolis-St Paul, but she did much to redeem herself here. She scouted through her outdated memory and found the Ernest Hemingway Museum in Oak Park, Illinois.

Hemingway himself had few flattering comments to make about his birthplace and boyhood home of Oak Park, Illinois. He later described it as a town of "Wide yards and narrow minds." The town seems to have forgiven him and the energetic Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park works tirelessly to foster "understanding of the life and work of Ernest Hemingway, with emphasis on his Oak Park origins and his impact on world literature."

I've always been a bit of a closet Hemingway fan. I usually don't go for the sweaty, macho kind of storyteller. There's just something about Hemingway's lean, aggressive prose that speaks directly to the senses. There is, miraculously, more energy in his writing than the pages can contain.

My favourite Hemingway quote comes from a letter he wrote to Mrs Paul Pfeiffer in 1933: "I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world-or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out thin." That's Hemingway's message to me: literary distillation, as well as all the other kinds.

The main part of the Hemingway museum was interesting. It features photographs and extracted texts, documentary screenings and artifacts of personal significance, including several weapons. A few blocks down the road is the house where Ernest Hemingway was born. It is now a museum too and we enjoyed an enthusiastic guided tour from a man who loves Hemingway, and the house.

I knew Hemingway from his writing, and from the somewhat muscular and hairy image he cultivated as a fighter of men, a seducer of women and a killer of animals. I knew almost nothing about his family or the influence his background had on the great writer and vain poser that he created of himself.

The Hemingways upstream of Ernest were certainly a colourful crowd, afflicted collectively with a complex blend of talent and personal despair. Death by suicide appears to have been something of an epidemic within the clan. Whole branches of the family tree removed themselves from the world with the same Hemingway vigour that they inhabited it. Various biological theories have been put forward to explain this but I'm not really satisfied with any of them. Perhaps people who commit themselves entirely to sucking the marrow out of life pay for their exhilarating peaks of experience with crushing lows. Maybe it was just the cumulative effect of this oppressive, lousy weather.