"Soldier's Home" revisited: a Hemingway mea culpa - Ernest Hemingway

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1993 by J.F. Kobler

In 1924, Ernest Hemingway wrote six stories about Nick Adams and one about Harold Krebs. These Nick stories make up the heart of the Adams chronology, ranging from early childhood in "Indian Camp" and "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," through adolescence in "The End of Something" and "The Three-Day Blow" up to the returned veteran in "Big Two-hearted River,' and culminating with the married Nick, whose wife is pregnant in "Cross Country Snow." At no other time in his career did Hemingway immerse himself so completely in the creation of Nick Adams. While taking himself through an 11-month journey with Nick, Hemingway for some reason digressed into his only fictional visit to Oklahoma, to which Harold Krebs of "Soldier's Home" has returned after serving in the Marines in France and Germany during and immediately after World War I. The primary purpose of this essay is to try to determine why for this one story Hemingway set Nick aside and created Krebs.

In order to make this determination, I must develop a reading of "Soldier's Home" that is greatly different from (and, I believe, more defensible than) those previous critics have set forth. Looking at "Soldier's Home" within the context of the six Nick stories and within the context of Hemingway's personal life and emotions in 1924 creates a different framework for a reading of what occurs within the text of the story. This new reading of the story is based largely on an evaluation of Harold Krebs's role in the Marines that, so far as I can discover, differs from any made before.(1)

One thing is certain about Hemingway's attitude toward "Soldier's Home": he did not see it as inferior to the Nick stories. On 15 August 1924, Hemingway told Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas that he had just finished writing a long fishing story in which everything was "made up" (Baker, Selected Letters 122). On 10 December of that same year, Hemingway wrote to Robert McAlmon that he had just finished "the best short story I ever wrote" (Baker, Selected Letters 139). The first of these stories is "Big Two-Hearted River"; the second is "Soldier's Home." Certainly, critical opinion during the last 69 years has tended to view the story about Nick's going fishing as superior to the one about Harold's coming home. Both stories concern the same general subject: the returned veteran, even if Nick's military experience is not mentioned. But, then, neither is Harold's. If we view Hemingway's own judgment about "Soldier's Home" more in terms of the psychic relief the writing brought to the author and less in comparative aesthetic terms, perhaps we can understand why the author was so enthusiastic about that story. I will argue here that Hemingway may very well have produced for himself in writing "Soldier's Home" something similar to the psychic control that the author created for Nick on his fishing trip in northern Michigan. "Soldier's Home" is the author's carefully constructed mea culpa for the lies he had told and for the truths he had allowed the press to distort regarding his own role, duties, and injury on the Italian front in 1918.(2) Hemingway was as careful to avoid an open confession in writing Krebs's story as he was to avoid an account of Nick's reason for needing to go fishing. Two major questions I hope to answer are these: Why did this hidden apology for the lies and distortions come in 1924, almost six years after Hemingway's own return home to Oak Park? Why does the mea culpa take the form of Harold Krebs's story rather than that of a Nick story?

A partial answer to the first of those two questions lies in the circumstances of Hemingway's life in 1924. The six Nick stories and the one Harold story were written during a year in which Hemingway was having to adjust to the major change in his life and plans brought about by the birth of his first son: "experimenting with living with a baby" he wrote to Ezra Pound on 17 March. "Baby hollers etc. Have tried to write but couldn't bring it off" (Baker, Selected Letters 112). This was not a baby that Hemingway welcomed; Bumby was causing serious changes in the Hemingway life style. "Cross Country Snow" shows Nick worrying before his child's birth about the very sort of restrictions on his life style that were already occurring for the author. Hemingway also complained to Pound about Ford Madox Ford's never recovering "in a literary way" from the miracle of "having been a soldier," and said that he (Hemingway) was "going to start denying I was in the war for fear I will get like Ford to myself about it" (Baker, Selected Letters 113). Hemingway never denied that he was in the war, but "Soldier's Home" in my reading denies that Krebs was actually in the war as a fighting Marine. Hemingway's apology to himself for his exaggeration of his role in that war lies buried in his creation of ex-Marine Harold Krebs, who, like Hemingway, did not actually do any fighting. If writing "Soldier's Home" provided relief to Hemingway's conscience for what he knew were distortions of his military experience, then writing "Big Two-Hearted River" encouraged Hemingway to believe that he really might be able to exercise some control over a life that was not going exactly the way he wanted it to go.