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

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

In his quest to prove that Hemingway's "`post war disillusionment', such as it was, proved to be a belated and derivative manifestation," (97) Crews ignores a great deal of very early evidence, including a 1926 letter to Maxwell Perkins. Writing twenty-two years earlier than the letter to Cowley that Crews picks at, Hemingway complains that Allen Tate has been unfair to him by creating a sort of critical dipstick with which to measure the depth of his alleged hardboiledness: "As a matter of fact I have not been at all hard boiled since July 8 1918-on the night of which I discovered that that also was Vanity" (sic) (Selected Letters 240) . The date Hemingway mentions, of course, is that of his wounding at Fossalta di Piave. It is difficult to posit a motivation for Hemingway to lie gratuitously to Perkins in 1926 about his reaction to being wounded.

Neither are Hemingway's early war poems taken into account by the revisionists, including one entitled "Killed Piave July $ -1918," in which a female speaker expresses her longing for her dead lover, who appears metaphorically as "A dull, cold, rigid bayonet" (Complete Poems 35). Written in Paris (all before 1923), the war poems offer little by way of literary achievement but do comprise more evidence that Hemingway thought seriously about the war and felt its wasteful, destructive nature early on, not belatedly. Lynn makes nothing of the poems but chooses to summarize Hemingway's many later assertions that the war had injured him as an obdurate old man's "effort[s] to account for his imperiled sense of himself, as well as to preserve his macho reputation" (Hemingway 106).

Finally neither Crews nor Lynn adequately deals with the imposing fact that so many of Hemingway's protagonistsincluding those in his earliest stories-are men wounded in war: Nick Adams, Jake Barnes, Frederic Henry, Robert Jordan. Sticking with his posthumous psychoanalysis, insistently returning to the sites of supposed childhood trauma, positing Hemingway as always and ever the victim of himself, Lynn ignores the recurrent presence of fictional protagonists wounded by war. This is not to say that Lynn does not delve into the psyches of these characters; rather, it is to say that he fails to come to terms with the fact that out of an infinite number of causes available with which to wound his main characters, Hemingway consistently chose war.

It is obviously impossible to disprove the centrality of the war in stories set at the front, such as "Now I Lay Me"; therefore Lynn's and Crews's arguments need be discussed no further in relation to these stories. However, both men have also examined "Big Two-Hearted River," and this story's relationship to the war is admittedly much more indirect. Predictably they have found that this story is not concerned with the war either, though many readers have seen it as depicting a war-traumatized Nick Adams returning to familiar territory for camping, fishing and psychic, perhaps spiritual, recovery. Not so, says Lynn. The story is really about Hemingway's rebellious squabbles with his mother Grace. For two consecutive summers after returning from the war, Hemingway and his mother fought an escalating series of battles that culminated in his banishment from the family summer home in July of 1920. Lynn deduces that this familial acrimony is the true psychic germ of Hemingway's famous story: