Almost Hemingway

The Adventures of Negley Farson, Foreign Correspondent

Rex Bowman, Carlos Santos

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813946672
• eBook ISBN: 9780813946689
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Would it surprise you to learn that there was a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway's who, in his romantic questing and hell-or-high-water pursuit of life and his art, was closer to the Hemingwayesque ideal than Hemingway himself? Almost Hemingway relates the life of Negley Farson, adventurer, iconoclast, best-selling writer, foreign correspondent, and raging alcoholic who died in oblivion. Born only a few years before Hemingway, Farson had a life trajectory that paralleled and intersected Hemingway's in ways that compelled writers for publications as divergent as the Guardian and Field & Stream to compare them. Unlike Hemingway, however, Farson has been forgotten.

This high-flying and literate biography recovers Farson's life in its multifaceted details, from his time as an arms dealer to Czarist Russia during World War I, to his firsthand reporting on Hitler and Mussolini, to his assignment in India, where he broke the news of Gandhi's arrest by the British, to his excursion to Kenya a few years before the Mau Mau Uprising. Farson also found the time to publish an autobiography, The Way of a Transgressor, which made him an international publishing sensation in 1936, as well as Going Fishing, one of the most enduring of all outdoors books.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, a fellow member of the Lost Generation whose art competed with a public image grander than reality, once confessed that while he had to rely on his imagination, Farson could simply draw from his own event-filled life. Almost Hemingway is the definitive window on that remarkable story.

1

Europe, 1925

IN THE SPRING OF 1925, Negley Farson set out from Rotterdam to sail across Europe.

His plan, though ambitious, was simple: in a twenty-six-foot yawl he had christened Flame, he and his wife, Eve, would run up the lower Rhine through the Netherlands, navigate their way along one of its tributaries, the Main River, pass through the nearly forgotten Ludwig Canal—parts of which had been dug in the time of Charlemagne—and from there drop into the Danube, which would speed them down to the Black Sea. Altogether the trip Farson envisioned would take them some eight months and carry their little boat three thousand miles.

For a thirty-five-year-old Mack truck salesman pocketing a comfortable paycheck and settled into a plodding middle-class life, the sailing venture smacked of boyhood fantasy.

“To sail across Europe had been a day-dream with me,” Farson explained at the very start of the book he was to write about the adventure.1 But on this day in June, Farson was not just embarking on a long journey across a continent to fulfill a fantasy, he was determined to reinvent himself. Selling trucks in the heat of Chicago summers had sapped his spirit. The gritty streets of Prohibition-era Chicago, the noisy trains, the pungent smell of the rush-hour masses—all of it had conspired to make him and Eve doubt their decision to live in the metropolis. Chicago had become a prison, and they yearned to escape. The sailing adventure across Europe was the laborious scheme Farson hatched to win back their freedom and to craft a different life for himself.

The idea sprang into being the previous year, 1924, in the stifling heat of a typical Chicago weekend. Unusually, none of their friends had invited the couple out to spend time in the suburbs, so he and Eve sat at home and stared glumly at a pile of thick Sunday newspapers. Eve, three years younger than her husband, noted that, no matter how much money he made, Farson would still have only two or three weeks a year to do what he loved—travel—if he kept his job in Chicago.

They pulled an atlas from a shelf, and in the semi-darkness—the humidity and heat forced them to keep their lights off—they took a make-believe voyage in a make-believe boat, starting in Rotterdam, Holland. Later at dinner in Chicago’s Loop, they ate cold lobster salad and continued their imaginary trip, cruising along with the sun on their faces.

“We’re only going to live once,” Farson said, edging his imaginary boat away from the safe shores of fantasy and into uncharted waters.2

They began to pore over the columns of their bank account. They had enough money, the ledger suggested, to buy that boat. In it they could travel the world without regard for hotel bills or railroad tickets.

So Farson began what he called his “almost insane efforts” to win an audience with Victor Lawson, proprietor and publisher of the Chicago Daily News, an evening newspaper and one of the many publications scrapping for readers in the ethnic cauldron that was Chicago’s population.3 To meet Lawson—with the naked aim of getting him to help bankroll the sailing expedition in exchange for a series of feature articles on the trip—Farson turned to his friends for help. First, there was Janet Ayer Fairbank, a Chicago suffragette, champion of Progressive causes, and daughter-in-law of industrialist N. K. Fairbank. Employing her status as a high-society matron, she dashed off a letter to Lawson, a kindred spirit when it came to Progressive causes, and promoted Farson as someone the publisher should meet. The second ace in Farson’s hand was Walter Strong, an executive at the Daily News.4 Strong, a cousin of Lawson’s wife, had perspicaciously pushed the Daily News to become the first newspaper to own a broadcasting station in the United States.5 Farson, who as a salesman had developed a knack for getting to know the right people, relied on Strong to offer advice on how to refine his sales pitch to Lawson. If Strong decided to personally put in a good word with the old man, that was fine too. A third accomplice was John F. Bass, the Daily News’ war correspondent on the Russian front during World War I, where he was wounded by German shrapnel. His relationship with Farson dated back to their days in St. Petersburg, Russia. Bass, in addition to being a professional journalist whose recommendation might carry some weight with Lawson, also offered Farson encouragement. For Farson’s grander scheme was to sail across Europe, send dispatches back to the newspaper along the way, then hope that the journey would end with an offer to join the staff of Lawson’s newspaper. Farson was angling to become a foreign correspondent. “The Daily News Foreign Service is far and away the best in America,” Bass told him. “Get a foreign job under Victor Lawson and you will have the finest job an American newspaper man can get.”6

Bass’s assessment was no schoolyard boast. The newspaper’s reporters abroad were among the best in the world. During a quarter century they had helped usher in a golden age of American foreign correspondence. Lawson had built his foreign desk from scratch, sending his first correspondent to Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Since then their numbers had swollen into the dozens, and they had covered themselves—and the Daily News—in glory. Though their names are almost completely forgotten now, in their day they were hero-worshipped and romanticized as maverick world-travelers, gifted linguists, fine writers, and hard drinkers not easily cowed by foreign policemen or regime apparatchiks. Among the best were Bass, Edward Price Bell, Paul Scott Mowrer and his brother Edgar Ansel Mowrer, Junius B. Wood, Raymond Swing, Bassett Digby, and John Gunther, who, like Farson, would later go on to wider fame. “Our men are journalistic intellectuals, with definite personalities, with considerable personal reputations, and charged with duties in the highest realm of newspaper work,” Bell once opined.7

At the onset of World War I, a decade before Farson set foot in Lawson’s office, the publisher’s reporters had proven the worth of foreign news bureaus, sending dispatches from all corners of the conflagration. Following the first shots, countless Americans who found themselves stranded in Europe flocked to the newspaper’s offices in London, Paris, and Berlin, forcing the correspondents to operate rescue centers as they labored to pull together the strands of the fast-breaking story.8 In Belgium, three correspondents rushed into action: one followed the first wave of German invaders while the other two mingled with the stunned inhabitants of the overrun cities and towns. Digby traveled to Siberia to cover the mass mobilization of Russia’s citizenry. Another correspondent was in Warsaw to tell the story of the failed German push to seize the city.9 In short order, Lawson had thirty correspondents in the field, some with the German army, others with the French. Publishers of other American newspapers watched in amazement as Lawson’s well-oiled foreign desk swung into action. “He was the pioneer in planting his correspondents wherever he suspected that a news item might grow,” said James Keeley, general manager of the rival Chicago Tribune. “When the war began Mr. Lawson’s foresight was justified. His harvest was at hand.”10 The British and French governments snatched the Daily News stories from the cables and shared them with their own newspapers. At one point the London News Chronicle gushed, “The Chicago Daily News is by far the best evening newspaper in the world.”11

The man who had created this engine of global newsgathering was, of course, Lawson. Born in Chicago to Norwegian immigrants, Lawson had inherited from his father the Skandinaven newspaper, which catered to the great city’s Norwegian population. Lawson had no intention of remaining a newspaper owner and planned to sell the newspaper to the first comer willing to buy it. Before he could get out of the business, though, he became the landlord of an upstart newspaper called the Chicago Daily News in 1875.12 The long hours and hard work necessary to make a newspaper successful prompted the paper’s owner to give up the business, and Lawson became its owner by virtue of taking over responsibility for its debts. He was not yet twenty-six. By 1925, Lawson had been in the newspaper business for nearly a half century and had helped to reshape the industry. In addition to creating a first-class foreign desk, he had hired columnists who waged lengthy civic-improvement campaigns, maintained a Progressive, independent editorial line, and promoted serialized fiction, human-interest stories, and journalistic stunts. He had once invested in an attempt to reach the North Pole by dirigible. All of this drove up circulation into the hundreds of thousands, established the Daily News as one of the world’s most formidable newspapers, and made Lawson rich.

When Farson at last opened the door to Lawson’s office in the labyrinth that the old building on North Wells Street had become, he was met by a small man with a finely groomed beard and penetrating brown eyes. The elder man, known to show up at the office nearly every day in an elegant gray coat and flat-topped hat, had such a delicate manner that Farson sized him up as “almost a timid man”—a judgment shared by Lawson’s father-in-law decades earlier.13 Charles H. Dennis, who worked for Lawson many years as an editor, insisted that Lawson was not timid but was merely a lifelong believer in the virtues of humility and caution.

Lawson skimmed clippings of some articles Farson had written for the New York Sun and Herald and told the aspiring correspondent, “I like what you have written.” He then began to talk reverentially about his foreign desk.14 Farson sensed that Lawson almost resented the younger man’s belief “that I should think myself fit to be taken into such company.”15 But by now Farson had honed his skills as a salesman. His pitch was simple: the Daily News foreign correspondents were outdoing themselves at covering the European capitals and developing sources in the diplomatic offices of the world powers, but Farson would find the “more realistic” face of Europe by sailing across the continent, where he would chat with peasants, workers, and tradesmen along the way and file his stories from the places that many of the Daily News readers had left behind when they immigrated to the New World.16 With or without Lawson’s support, he said, he and his wife were going to sail across Europe—so shouldn’t the Daily News profit from his dispatches? In Lawson’s era, newspaper editors considered such bold behavior, bordering on reckless, as the mark of a man with potential. For instance, William H. Stoneman, on the local desk of the Daily News for three years, simply sailed to Stockholm without advance notice and informed the newspaper that it now had a correspondent in Sweden. Editors were delighted. John Gunther, hired by the Daily News out of college, abruptly quit his beat in Chicago, sailed to London, and got rehired by the newspaper.17 Farson sat in Lawson’s office and hoped for that kind of response to his proposal.

“The great editor sucked his thumb like a child while my destiny hung in the air,” Farson later recalled. “Then he nodded. ‘It’s a splendid idea!’ he said. ‘Do it!’”18 And that was that.

The Mack company had bestowed on Farson an unexpectedly large bonus at the end of the year, and he used it along with a little money he and Eve had saved to pay their fares to England, where he scoured the marinas and harbors until he found a twenty-six-foot Norfolk Broads centerboard yawl. Before they left, his colleagues at Mack threw him a party at the Illinois Athletic Club and gave him, among other gifts, a Mannlicher rifle, a Graflex camera, and a revolver.19

Now, with Chicago a hazy memory, Farson set out from the harbor of Rotterdam alone on his little boat, leaving behind the group of drinking buddies he had quickly accrued at the Royal Den Maas Yacht Club. The date was June 19, 1925. Eve had gone ahead over land to do some sightseeing in the Dutch village of Gouda, where she hoped to get a view of a particular stained-glass window. Her father, Tom, had died five days before, and she was spending time with her mother in Holland before embarking on the journey with her husband. Farson was to pick her up on the riverbank at nearby Lekkerkerk at sundown. So, by himself he worked to steer his way out of the Meuse at Rotterdam, an ordeal he maintained was as harrowing as a drive in rush-hour traffic along Fifth Avenue in New York or Piccadilly in London. The river was a mad jumble of tugboats with trawlers in tow, wide Dutch vessels with large red sails, cargo ships heading toward the Rhine, others heading toward the ocean, for Haarlem and Delft, and coal ships arriving from the Ruhr Valley. In the middle of it all, piloted by a rusty captain accustomed to the wide waters of the Chesapeake Bay, bobbed Farson’s boat, Flame.

Farson relished the fact that he was an American citizen sailing an English ship in Dutch waters, but he cursed his reliance on his German chart. From the outset of his trip across Europe, he realized that navigation would be problematic. The chart was in kilometers, not miles, none of the buoys were marked, and numerous waterways ran into the river from left and right to create confusion as to which stream was actually the Rhine and which a mere tributary. There were also bits of land that appeared as islands on his map, but not so much in reality. More than once Farson trusted his luck to pick the right course around a jumble of land in the middle of the stream. As the hours passed, he made it out of the thick river traffic and found time to take in the scenery. He saw ducks paddling out of rushes to take flight, a flat, green countryside dotted by clumps of willows, the red tile roofs of villages, the peaceful curves of the river. “Suddenly my whole soul filled with deep contentment...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Remembering Negley Farson
• 1. Europe, 1925
• 2. The Old General
• 3. Fish Mad
• 4. England and War
• 5. Russia
• 6. Crash Landing in Egypt
• 7. Life in the Wilds
• 8. The Exotic Life of a Foreign Correspondent
• 9. Whaling Adventure
• 10. Among the Spaniards
• 11. Russia Again
• 12. Meeting Gandhi
• 13. Covering Hitler and the World
• 14. Writing a Best Seller
• 15. South American Bender
• 16. Taking the Cure
• 17. His Life in a Novel
• 18. Mired in African Mud and Acrimony
• 19. A Bomber’s Moon
• 20. Writing a Masterpiece
• 21. Back to Russia
• 22. Back to Africa
• 23. Road’s End
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index