‘His own peculiar style of hieroglyphics’: Hemingway, baseball, and the busher figure

ABSTRACT

The Busher figure was a recurring character found in both the mass market fiction and sports journalism of the early twentieth century—including the apprenticeship writings of Ernest Hemingway. The cultural significance of the Busher was explored in Hemingway’s early letters, high school and post-high school journalism, and a parody of Ring Lardner written for a Red Cross newsletter in 1918. In each instance, the Busher’s presence illustrated the figure’s role in linking the game of baseball to American culture.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Scott D. Peterson is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri—St. Louis. He is the author of Reporting Baseball's Sensational Season of 1890: The Brotherhood War and the Rise of Modern Sports Journalism, along with several articles on baseball literature and culture. As a long-time member of the Sport Literature Association, Peterson serves as the fiction editor for Aethlon, the group's journal.

Notes

1 Gerald Beaumont, Hearts and the Diamond (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1921), 171.

2 Ed Weiner, The Damon Runyon Story (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1943), xii.

3 Van Loan’s The Big League (1911) and The Lucky Seventh (1913) each contained nine stories, some of which had been published in The Popular Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post as early as 1909.

4 Cordelia Candelaria, Seeking the Perfect Game: Baseball in American Literature (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 84.

5 Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, ‘Semiotics and Art History’, The Art Bulletin 73, no. 2 (1991): 183.

6 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism’, in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 19.

7 Ibid., 23–4.

8 Heywood Broun, Sitting on the World (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924), 124.

9 Michael Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction 1868–1980 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982), 6. Oriard’s definition required that the narrative take a sport as its centre to the degree that the fabric of the work would be damaged by changing the sport.

10 Peter Dowell and Lee Pederson, ‘Baseball and Ernest Hemingway’, in The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture 2002, ed. William M. Simons (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2003), 199–215; C. Harold Hurley, Hemingway’s Debt to Baseball in The Old Man and the Sea: A Collection of Readings (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992).

11 Steven P. Gietschier, ‘Slugging and Snubbing: Hugh Casey, Ernest Hemingway, and Jackie Robinson—A Baseball Mystery’, NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture 21, no. 1 (2012): 12–46; Bob Reising, ‘Revisiting Ernest Hemingway and Baseball: Sanity, Success, and Suicide’, The Journal of American Culture 39, no. 2 (2016): 165–76. Gietschier’s article provides an especially useful overview of baseball references found in Hemingway’s fiction, journalism, and letters.

12 Ernest Hemingway, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Vol. 1, eds. Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 11.

13 Ibid., 18.

14 Cindy Thomson, ‘Mordecai Brown’, Society of American Baseball Research, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/b0508a3c (accessed March 14, 2019).

15 Bill Lamberty, ‘Sam Crawford’, Society of American Baseball Research, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/11b83a0d (accessed March 14, 2019).

16 Scott Turner, ‘Frank Schulte’, Society of American Baseball Research, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/66b47e26 (accessed March 1, 2019).

17 Ibid.

18 Donald Elder, Ring Lardner: A Biography (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1956), 66.

19 F.C. Lane, ‘The Man with the Crippled Arm’, Baseball Magazine 13, no. 4 (August 1914): 41; ‘Southpaws Leading’, Baseball Magazine 19, no. 6 (October 1917): 583.

20 Steven Riess, Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 163.

21 H.L. Mencken, ‘Répétition Générale’, The Smart Set (September 1922): 51; H.L. Mencken, H. L. Mencken on American Literatgure, ed. S.T. Joshi (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002), 163.

22 Hemingway, Letters, Vol. 1, 12.

23 Lenny Jacobsen, ‘Charles Murphy’, Society of American Baseball Research, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/e707728f (accessed March 12, 2019).

24 Dearborn, Ernest Hemingway, 42; Hemingway, Letters, Vol. 1, 47.

25 Mary V. Dearborn, Ernest Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), 38–9.

26 Hemingway, Letters, Vol. 1, 60; Dearborn, Ernest Hemingway, 38, 39.

27 Dearborn, Ernest Hemingway, 39.

28 Hemingway, Letters, Vol. 1, 59.

29 Jim Nitz, ‘Happy Felsch’, Society of American Baseball Research, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/cd61b579 (accessed March 3, 2019).

30 Ernest Hemingway, The Nick Adams Stories (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 134.

31 Ibid., 134.

32 George Monteiro, ‘Grover Cleveland Alexander in 1918: A New Kansas City Piece by Ernest Hemingway’, American Literature 54, no. 1 (1982): 116.

33 Ibid.

34 Jan Finkel, ‘Pete Alexander’, Society of American Baseball Research, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/79e6a2a7 (accessed March 3, 2019).

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid. For a later portrayal of Alexander that is consistent with Alexander’s Busher beginnings, see The Winning Team, a 1952 film starring Ronald Reagan and Doris Day.

37 Monteiro, ‘Grover Cleveland Alexander’, 117.

38 Ibid.

39 Dearborn, Ernest Hemingway, 46; Monteiro, ‘Grover Cleveland Alexander’, 118.

40 Dearborn, Ernest Hemingway, 46.

41 W.A. Phelon, ‘Closing Event of the 1918 Baseball Season’, Baseball Magazine 21, no. 6 (October 1918): 483.

42 Monteiro, ‘Grover Cleveland Alexander’, 118.

43 Hemingway, Letters, Vol. 1, 90.

44 Monteiro, ‘Grover Cleveland Alexander’, 117.

45 Charles F. Faber, ‘Charlie Deal’, Society of American Baseball Research, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/561ceb40 (accessed March 3, 2019).

46 J.C. Kofoed, ‘The Youngsters of 1917’, Baseball Magazine 19, no. 4 (August 1917): 432, 460.

47 Hemingway, Letters, Vol. 1, 90.

48 Ibid.

49 Hemingway, Letters, Vol. 1, 60.

50 Ernest Hemingway, ‘Al Receives Another Letter’. CIAO (Published by the American Red Cross Ambulance Service Section 4), June 1918.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

56 Dearborn, Ernest Hemingway, 78–9.

57 Ibid., 93.

58 Ibid., 96.