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

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

Hemingway did, indeed, feel the need, some five years after creating a false image of himself as a war hero, to soothe his own conscience. The relative unhappiness of his personal life in 1924 was instrumental in causing him to produce a fictional account destroying in effect the falsely achieved happiness of 1919. A minor reason for the change from Adams to Krebs may be that Hemingway felt the need for Krebs's sisters as integral parts of the story. Nick never has any visible siblings, a fact that makes him actually less autobiographically close to Hemingway than is Harold. Surely even more important was the fact, as Lynn says, that Hemingway could see himself moving into the public realm that year. In doing so, he could not risk tainting that public image by associating even this deeply buried confession too closely with the diverse but essentially positive Nick Adams image, created largely in the same year. Even if readers were not yet beginning to see autobiographical connections between Hemingway and a sympathetic boy like the Nick of that period, surely Hemingway himself was aware of the generalities of the character he was creating in Nick. Perhaps most directly he would have seen major incompatabilities between the Nick of "Big Two-Hearted River" and the character he was creating in "Soldier's Home." Hemingway seems to have created two different sides of his personality in creating that Nick and Harold Krebs.

Thus Hemingway not only camouflaged his confession by giving it to Krebs in Oklahoma instead of Nick in Michigan; he also sank that confession under an ocean of words so beautifully ambiguous that readers could listen to a confession and never know they had done so. Hemingway seems to have achieved the immediate psychic relief he needed without doing any damage to his burgeoning public reputation. Hemingway did not need to make his own mother look bad by creating Mrs. Krebs nearly so much as he needed to assuage his own conscience by getting this deeply hidden mea culpa into fiction.

Can we really blame the author for believing that the dignity of movement of a short story may be attributed to the seven-eighths of it that lies beneath the surface? It is, after all, the reader's duty to keep his critical eye so carefully on the one-eighth that lies above the surface that he will not founder on the seven-eighths he cannot see.

(1) Richard B. Hovey's comments on Krebs are typical in their assumptions about his wartime activities. After describing how Nick Adams has been close to death, Hovey says that "the protagonist of |Soldier's Home' is a similarly nerve-racked veteran. Back in his home town, Krebs encounters exactly what the sleepless lieutenant anticipated. He is restless, isolated, and cannot tell anyone what he has been through" (8). One of the most enthusiastic endorsements of Krebs is especially worth citing because it comes in an essay that argues not for Hemingway's psychological need to make up for the lies he told (or let accumulate) about his wartime exploits, but rather for his need to "exorcise his fears" caused by his injury. Lawrence Broer (11, 32) writes that Hemingway never mentions "the scenes of dying and mutilation and emotional confusion that have worn indelibly on Krebs' mind," but rather causes the alert reader to "recognize that for Krebs the war has been a shattering experience and that he has been emotionally disabled by what he has seen." Other critics tacitly assume Krebs's experiences, as Sheldon Norman Grebstein does in speaking of "the excitement of combat" that Krebs experienced (14). Scott Donaldson appears to believe that Krebs has had real fighting experiences, writing that "He'd like to talk about the war, but no one wants to hear how it really was" (224). (2) This reading of "Soldier's Home" does not question Philip Young's argument for the major influence of Hemingway's 1918 injury upon his fiction, but argues that the public and personal distortions of the circumstances of that injury, at least for a period in 1924, also bothered Hemingway sufficiently to cause him to fictionalize his emotions. Since Krebs was not wounded, Young had no reason to discuss "Soldier's Home" in his book. (3) Grebstein also sees a change in the narrative point of view in this story, but his analysis places "an editorializing and even occasionally didactic narrator" as present in at least the sixth paragraph of the story. He says that the story "changes to limited omniscience and dramatic scene," but he does not account for where this change occurs (81). (4) "Spin control" may not be greatly different from what Gerry Brenner calls Hemingway's "penchant for doubleness." Although Brenner does not discuss "Soldier's Home," he has certainly demonstrated through analysis of other texts that notions "of his [Hemingway's] craftiness, his artistic duplicity" can no longer be seen as merely "perverse, or as proof of over-exercised ingenuity" (12).