The love song of Harold Krebs: form, argument, and meaning in Hemingway's 'Soldier's Home.'

Hemingway Review, The, Spring, 1995 by Robert Paul Lamb

- Flannery O'Connor(1)

Because it is Hemingway's only story about a First World War veteran's homecoming and a story that portrays a conflicted mother-son relationship, "Soldier's Home" has been, along with "Big Two-Hearted River" and "Now I Lay Me," a highly contested text in the debate between critics who, following Philip Young, locate war trauma at the heart of Hemingway's fiction and those who focus instead on the author's unhappy childhood.(2) One early "war wound" critic, Frederick Hoffman, speaking of the "unreasonable wound" Hemingway suffered in 1918 and his consequent repetition compulsion, sees the story as the "sharpest portrait" in 1920s fiction of the returning veteran. "In the absence of any clearly defined reasons for having fought," according to Hoffman," the returned soldier felt hurt, ill at ease, uncertain of his future, 'disenchanted'" (98). Like other veterans, Hemingway's Harold Krebs is unable to "adjust to the life he had left" for the war; he no longer loves anyone and can not "bring himself to enjoy or respect his family, his home" (98). And so he must go away.(3)

The principal "childhood wound" critic, however, thinks Krebs's wartime experiences barely worth noting. Instead, Kenneth Lynn sees the story as a transmutation into fiction of Hemingway's own troubled postwar response to his family and as an attack by the author on his mother, akin to the one in "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," in which Hemingway's home town of Oak Park has been changed to a "town in Oklahoma" (258). Observing that Krebs's last name derives from Hemingway's comrade, Krebs Friend, "who had married a woman fully old enough to be his mother" (258), but ignoring in his analysis of the story that Friend was also a shell-shocked veteran, Lynn focuses on the "portrayal of Mrs. Krebs's tyranny" (259) that he regards as the story's triumph.(4) He concludes with this assessment:

'Soldier's Home' is the story of a young man's struggle to separate from home, and Hemingway packed it with a lifetime of revulsion and outrage. Nevertheless, the utterly unrelenting, utterly unqualified characterization of Mrs. Krebs as a monster revealed that the author was in fact still in thrall to her flesh-and blood counterpart. (260)(5)

As these conflicting interpretations demonstrate, "Soldier's Home" is a complex story. But it is a structurally divided one as well, bifurcated into two nearly equal parts of summary exposition and scenic development in which the war wound interpretation (here manifested in the theme of a veteran's postwar alienation) derives from the first half of the text and the childhood wound interpretation from the second half. Therefore, unless one is foolish enough to insist on a determinate or predominant meaning, both interpretations have merit. I cannot fault Hoffman; anyone writing about literary responses to the war would be remiss not to see this story as a textualization of postwar disillusionment. Nor can I blame Lynn for searching out the biographical relevance of the text (he is, after all, writing a biography), even if the use of fiction as biographical evidence can lead to a misunderstanding of that fiction as fiction (e.g., how can the characterization of Mrs. Krebs be "utterly unqualified" unless we regard her only as a depiction of Mrs. Hemingway?).

On the other hand, no story can be satisfactorily interpreted by de-emphasizing half of its text. In addition, by neglecting the story's form and merely mining it for sociological and biographical content, these critics have missed the manner of Hemingway's narrative argument as well as the considerable art that underlies it, for what "Soldier's Home" really means depends on how it means. Despite the story's neat division into summary exposition that points to one interpretation and scenic development that points to another, there must exist the relationship that normally obtains between these two elements of a realist text (certainly, at least, of a non-postmodernist text). That is, exposition provides us with the informational context necessary to understand development, and development illustrates and formally flows from exposition. Were this not so, then one or the other would be gratuitous and the story would make no sense. Any adequate interpretation of the story must therefore take into account these elements - exposition and development, summary and scene - because each is an indispensable part of how the story functions: its particular structure, its narrative argument, and its terrain of potential meaning. In other words, the "either/or" attitude that critics have brought to this story needs to be replaced by a "both/and" reading that subsumes the war wound and childhood wound interpretations within a more inclusive perspective exploring the aesthetic and cultural consequences of the entire text.(6)

I

Summary exposition raises inherent epistemological questions more severely than scene, especially scene that is mostly dialogue - how reliable is the narrator? This is particularly true when exposition is lengthy and unsubstantiated by scene with dialogue, which, by convention, is generally considered reliable when presented in the third person. Because exposition, or diegesis, is by its nature less convincing than scene, or mimesis, and because it raises these epistemological questions, Hemingway employs narrative strategies to make the exposition more convincing and also to raise questions about the reliability of the scenes. He thereby balances the story's conflicting exposition and scenic development, as well as the interpretations that derive from them.