Ernest Hemingway and World War I: Combatting recent psychobiographical reassessments, restoring the war

Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 2000 by Stewart, Matthew C

2This sort of either-or rhetoric too frequently mars Lynn's provocative study. Not content to shed light on an underemphasized aspect of the story, he typically overstates the case, denying the obvious importance of the war.

3The most up-to-date and thorough account of this portion of Hemingway's life is to be found in Villard and Nagel; see especially James Nagel's chapter entitled "Hemingway and the Italian Legacy, 197-270. Reynolds First War retains scholarly value as well.

4Later in life, Hemingway himself wrote to Arthur Mizener that out of concern for him after he returned from the war his younger sister Ursula would wait up for him and sleep with him (Selected Letters 697).

5In 1945 Hemingway wrote to Cowley, "The gen is RAF slang for intelligence, the hand out at the briefing. The true gen is what they know but don't tell you" (Selected Letters 603, emphasis in original).

6See especially Lansky, Peterson and Solomon.

7Observations on the effects of trauma and the behavior of trauma victims are elaborated in a large and still-growing body of professional writings about reactions to stress in combat and to other forms of posttraumatic stress disorder. For example, see Blank, Clipp and Elder, Laufer, and McFarlane.

8For discussion of Hemingway and fame and for an elaboration of the Papa myth and the depiction of the macho Hemingway see Donaldson and Raeburn.

9A11 the major biographies treat Hemingway's relationship with Arthur Mizener, Philip Young and Charles Fenton. James R. Mellow gives the most concentrated consideration of this subject, drawing upon Hemingway's unpublished letters to Carlos Baker (562-78).

10 In any number of war veterans' oral histories and in case studies of young war veterans, one repeatedly reads of their resentment at having adult status thrust upon them all at once in war only to return home to families, employers, indeed, to a society in general that ignores or tries to retract that adult status conferred in extremis during their military service.

"In his role as Lynn's bulldog, Crews lauds Lynn's proclamations that the critic ought "to be guided by the story itself rather than by the retrospective gloss" (Crews 96). Lynn's problem is that he himself does not stick to this method, and Crews's problem is that he seems not to have noticed that Lynn does not follow his own advice. It is also interesting to note that in his biography Lynn spends four and a half pages arguing against the war-wound interpretation but only devotes one paragraph to sketching out his own mother-conflict interpretation.

'hile the narrator is never named, there are so many similarities between him and Nick Adams that many critics have accorded "In Another Country" the status of literally being about Nick Adams, and most have, at the very least, accorded it the status of being what Joseph DeFalco has termed a "generic Nick Adams" story.

'3For the dating of the stories' composition, see Paul Smith's extraordinarily thorough guide (85-86,164-65,172-73, 268-71 ) . There is also good evidence that Hemingway wished to write "A Way You'll Never Be" in the twenties, made several attempts to write it then, but simply could not do so until more time had passed. In light of the various war stories written by Hemingway several years after the end of the war, one scarcely knows what to make of Crews's claim that "Hemingway's `postwar disillusionment'. . . proved to be a belated and derivative manifestation" (97) . One might also question the rather odd critical standard by which the worthiness of a piece of fiction is judged according to the length of time its author required for creative germination.