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

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

There is indeed a great deal more evidence that indicates Hemingway was profoundly influenced by the war. Both his life and his fictions show that the wounding had its serious effects. Members of Hemingway's family who observed him upon his return from the war would agree. His brother Leicester has written that "not all of Ernest's wounds were physical. Like hundreds of thousands of other soldiers before and since, he had received some psychic shock. He was plagued by insomnia and couldn't sleep unless he had a light in his room" (48) .4 It could be argued that Leicester, a young boy when Hemingway returned from Italy, must be judged a second-hand source in regards to this event, perhaps even that he is only giving a version of events fed to him at some later date by brother Ernest. However, Leicester was actually an early debunker of some of Ernest's Italian war tales, and in regards to this particular portion of his brother's life is not gullible (My Brother 46-47, interviewed in Brian 22). Furthermore, Marcelline, who was twenty one at the time, also relates her brother's troubled mental state in her memoirs. "In between [his] extrovert activities Ernie had quiet, almost depressed intervals," she writes (Sanford 183) . But she actually proceeds to betray her protect the-family name use of the word almost, for she describes her brother as staying in bed for long periods of time, drinking on the sly to ease his pain, retreating from family activities and showing little inclination to forge an adult identity for himself (173-199).

A reading of Hemingway's letters also reveals a change in his state of mind after the war. With an oddly narrow selectivity and tendentious emphasis, Crews examines Hemingway's 1948 letter to Cowley, wherein Hemingway states, "In the first war, I now see, I was hurt very badly; in the body, mind and spirit; and also morally" (qtd. in Cowley, "Wound" 229). Crews emphasizes the clause 1 now see to declare that Hemingway "belatedly claimed to have adopted this poignant" war-wound reading (96). As I have already shown, there is a great deal of evidence apart from this one letter with which to counter Crews's mis-emphasis, but a different reading of the letter also presents itself as plausible. It is more tenable to emphasize the words very badly, so that we see the older Hemingway not belatedly claiming a wound he never felt, as Crews would have it, but better understanding the dimensions and profundity of that wound. This interpretation is bolstered when the next sentence from the letter is not omitted from consideration: "The true gen is I was hurt bad all the way through" (qtd. in Cowley, "Wound" 229-30). All the way through, Hemingway particularizes, and, more tellingly, he uses a favorite phrase of his at the time-the true gen-which he used to signify the transcendent, core truth adhering to an event.5 The gen, the mere fact, had always been that Hemingway was wounded; the true gen was that he had been wounded deeply, quite probably so deeply that his trauma found itself in his stories in a way that he was only partially conscious of and only partially but not totally in control of as an author. Such slowly arrived-at self understanding, the gradual (or eventual) coming to terms with the sort of trauma suffered by Hemingway should not be difficult to imagine.