“They All Made Peace—What Is Peace?”
In this podcast James Gifford talks to Jonathan Conlin about Hemingway’s poetic response to the Lausanne conference, winter sports, and a lost suitcase.
As a Paris-based correspondent for the Toronto Star Ernest Hemingway spent three weeks in Istanbul in October 1922 covering the Turkish War of Independence. After a short interval back in Paris he headed east again in November, covering the Lausanne negotiations from 22 November until 16 December 1922. A keen skier, he returned to hit the slopes (and bobsled run) at nearby Montreux in January 1923.
ALL of the turks are gentlemen and Ismet Pasha is a little deaf. But
the Armenians. How about the Armenians?
Well the Armenians.
These experiences inspired a poem, “They All Made Peace—What is Peace?” subsequently published by Ezra Pound in The Little Review, in the same issue as the vignettes and stories which made up Hemingway’s In Our Time. Professor of English at Farleigh Dickinson University, James Gifford published an edition of these 1923 texts in 2015. In this podcast he reads the poem and discusses its place both in Hemingway’s oeuvre and in Modernism, as well as Hemingway’s view of post-war peacemaking.
Hemingway (right) at Lausanne with fellow journalist Lincoln Steffens.
Further Reading:
Carey Craig, “Mr. Wilson’s War: Peace, Neutrality, and Entangling Alliances in Hemingway’s In Our Time“, Hemingway Review 31.2. (2012): 6-26.
Ernest Hemingway, “In Our Time” & “They All Made Peace-What Is Peace?”: The 1923 Text ed. James Gifford (Victoria, British Columbia: Modernist Visions Project, 2015).
Ernest Hemingway, Dateline, Toronto: The Complete “Toronto Star” Dispatches, 1920-1924 ed. William White (New York: Scribner’s, 1985).
David Roessel, “Rewriting Reminiscences: Hemingway, Dos Passos and the Greco-Turkish War of 1920-1922” in Savas Patislides, ed., Hellenism and the U.S. (Thessaloniki: Aristotle University Press, 1994), pp. 33-40.
David Roessel, “New Information on Hemingway’s ‘3 very fine weeks’ in Constantinople in 1922”, Resources for American Literary Study 34 (2009): 107-28.
Image Credits: Courtesy JFK Presidential Library, EH6932P and EH5150P.
The Lausanne Project 