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

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

Perhaps another reason why 1924 was the year of confession lies in the fact that it may mark the time when Hemingway began to exist as a public figure. Kenneth Lynn argues that Hemingway's running with the bulls of Pamplona in the summer of 1924 created "the take-off point of the general public's awareness of Hemingway the man." Lynn defends his assertion that Hemingway's public fame did not arise until 1924 by citing newspaper accounts from 1919 about Hemingway's taking "more punishment than any other man who had fought the Central Powers," and of being "the worst shot-up man in the U.S." (262). It is Lynn's contention that, despite this earlier attention to Hemingway's alleged war exploits, his real public personality did not begin to take shape until 1924. Although Lynn is using this information only to demonstrate what he takes to be the beginning of Hemingway's public fame, the psychological connection between Hemingway's "bravado" in Pamplona and the earlier press accounts of his assumed heroism suggests the very continuity of personal experience and psychic anguish that makes up a primary thesis of Lynn's biography. The extreme acts of bravery (or foolhardiness) in which Hemingway indulged in Pamplona in July 1924 may well have been designed to compensate for the bravery he did not get to demonstrate in the war, and "Soldier's Home" may equally well be the author's subtle apology for the lies he told and the untruths he fostered in 1919, parading around Oak Park in his well-fitting officer's uniform, carrying his cane and wearing his Italian cape. Was Hemingway punishing himself when he put Krebs into that ill-fitting uniform?

The reasons why Hemingway gave his fictional confession to Harold Krebs rather than to Nick Adams are complex, but not necessarily for some of those critics who believe in a single, unified, continuous, self-consistent character named Nick Adams. For them an answer comes easily. As Joseph Flora says, Hemingway could not have written this as a Nick story because "Nick would not surrender to his mother as Krebs did to his" (44). In contrast to Flora, Carlos Baker says that "Soldier's Home' might have had Nick as its central character (Hemingway 130). This essay takes exception to both positions. For readers who do not believe that Hemingway intended to create or succeeded in creating a homogeneous Nick, an answer is much harder to find.

I cannot believe that Hemingway moved the story out of the Adams family and into another family just to protect his own mother. Would an author with such a concern have published "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife"? Nor can I believe that he moved it to protect the image of either an existing or a potential Nick Adams, war hero. Nick is not a war hero, any more than are Frederic Henry or Jake Barnes, who was, after all, wounded while flying on the "joke front." Hemingway, to be very frank, did not produce any war heroes as surrogates for the author, at least before Robert Jordan. All the stories about a wounded Nick Adams were written after "Soldier's Home," except for Chapter 6 of in our time. The Nick of "Big Two-hearted River" gives no evidence of being physically wounded, and the reader learns nothing about the nature of his war experience. If I cannot in good conscience argue that Hemingway created Krebs and put him in Oklahoma to protect in some way either the author's own mother and their tenuous relationship or his character Nick Adams, then I will have to argue that Hemingway's setting of this story in Oklahoma and the creating of Krebs were designed to protect the author himself.