SOURCE: Stewart, Matthew C. “Ernest Hemingway and World War I: Combatting Recent Psychobiographical Reassessments, Restoring the War.” Papers on Language and Literature 36, no. 2 (spring 2000): 115-217.

[In the following essay, Stewart attempts to refute revisionist arguments about the influence of World War I on Hemingway's fiction.]

“Napoleon taught Stendahl how to write.”

—Ernest Hemingway

To ask whether or not the First World War had a profound effect upon Ernest Hemingway would, not so long ago, have been considered a rhetorical question. It can no longer be considered so, since the influential critics Kenneth S. Lynn and Frederick Crews have sought to dismiss the importance of World War I from Hemingway's life and fiction.¹ The mainstream interpretation, which held sway well into the 1980s, had been advanced in most detail by Philip Young, whose breadth of analysis and psychoanalytical bent amplified the theory of the wound first advanced by Edmund Wilson. Although he did not speak as extensively of the wound theory, Malcolm Cowley had already marked out Hemingway's First World War experiences as a turning point in his life as early as 1945.

Following Cowley and Young, many a teacher taught many a student that Hemingway was badly wounded at the war—wounded inside as well as outside. The war left him with a fear of night, a fear said to relate to his abrupt confrontation with his own mortality. It gave him insight into the fragility of the world, and it fostered a deep skepticism towards the grand abstractions that the First World War rendered bitterly ironic. For a generation of critics, the war was not only the obvious subject matter, the sine qua non, of certain stories and novels, it also undergirded the entire oeuvre, and lurked below the surface of certain important stories that never mentioned the war. But times have changed, and as Susan Beegel puts it in her recent bibliographic essay on Hemingway criticism, in the 1980s “it became clear that the ‘wound’ and the ‘code’ were about to be muscled off the stage of Hemingway studies” (289). Because the psychobiographical version elaborated by Lynn and supported by Crews inaccurately reappraises Hemingway's life and work in relation to the war, and because this erroneous version has gained considerable currency—indeed, much outright acceptance—among general readers and academics alike, I would like to consider anew the importance of the First World War in Hemingway's life and work.

I am not concerned here with clarifying the events surrounding Hemingway's wounding at Fossalta di Piave, for Robert W. Lewis, Michael Reynolds, and, most skeptically, Jeffrey Meyers have thoroughly examined this episode. In a study co-credited to Henry S. Villard, James Nagel has constructed the most convincing say on this matter, countering to a degree the more skeptical scholarly opinions. They have shown the necessity of questioning biographical sources and interpretations that have hardened into “facts,” and, more importantly, their discussions of Hemingway's war experiences rid this portion of his life of a critical one-dimensionality that may have begun to cling to it. But Lynn and Crews have subsequently substituted one sort of unidimensionality for another. They make it seem as if the war slid off Hemingway like water off a duck's back and have asked us to understand that some of his most admired war stories are not really war stories after all. Such stories as “Now I Lay Me” and “Big Two-Hearted River,” they argue, do not have a wounding nor even the generalized trauma of war at their center, perhaps not even at their periphery. From the demythification of Hemingway's own wound, these critics have extrapolated a Hemingway profoundly unchanged by what he experienced in Italy. Thus Frederick Crews on Hemingway: “Nothing in his subsequent conduct suggests that he returned from Italy with a subdued temper, much less a revulsion against killing or a grasp of the issues and ironies behind the war” (95). Thus Kenneth S. Lynn on “Now I Lay Me,” a story set seven kilometers from the front in Italy and whose two main characters are hospitalized soldiers: “What counts supremely in the story is not the northern Italian frame that has made so many readers regard it as a tale of war, but the childhood memories within the frame” (Hemingway 48).²

Writing on the publication of Hemingway's Selected Letters in 1981, Lynn argued that the war played no part in “Big Two-Hearted River,” a story he describes as “a sun-drenched, Cézannesque picture of a predominantly happy fishing trip” (“Private War” 26). In the process of laying out his surprising version of Hemingway's famous story, Lynn rakes Malcolm Cowley over the coals. Attaching anti-American motives to Cowley, he excoriates his introduction to The Portable Hemingway, wherein he sees Cowley “shoveling much more war-victim material into “Big Two-Hearted River” (“Private War” 25). In 1984 Cowley responded to Lynn's attack, reiterating his belief in the importance of Hemingway's war experience and offering as new testimony a previously unpublished letter from 1948 in which Hemingway directly states that Cowley was correct about the war wound: “‘Big Two Hearted River’ [sic] is a story about a man who is home from the war” (Cowley, “Hemingway's Wound” 230). In 1985, R. W. B. Lewis thought that the argument had been put to rest, with Cowley winning the day. Not so, however. In his subsequently published biography, Lynn devotes over four pages to refuting the war-trauma interpretation of “Big Two-Hearted River” and asserts that Hemingway's letter was one of several posthumously published pieces which that Hemingway to be “a master manipulator … making fools of [critics] from beyond the grave” (Hemingway 106). Thereafter Frederick Crews joined ranks with Lynn, specifically countering both Cowley and Lewis and asserting the wholesale claim that Hemingway returned from the war unchanged. The rest of this essay will be a direct refutation of the revisionists' interpretation of the war's influence on both Hemingway's life and fiction, using “Big Two-Hearted River” as a case in point.

Crews in particular makes much of the cheery, jocular tone found in the young Hemingway's letters home from the Italian hospital where he was recuperating. These letters prove, he claims, that Hemingway couldn't have been much hurt: “the adeptness of his sprightly rhetoric sits poorly with the conventional idea of his thoroughly unnerved, shell-shocked condition” (95). Setting aside the caricature of “the conventional idea” as holding that Hemingway was immediately and absolutely psychically altered by his wounding, what Crews too easily dismisses is the rhetorical context of these letters home. Very likely Hemingway did as millions of war veterans have done and adopted the uncomplaining, kidding stoicism expected of him under the circumstances. The manly thing, the adult thing, the heroic thing was not to let on to those at home. Besides putting on the brave and happy face, the later letters could well constitute a bid for public attention, as James R. Mellow has asserted (63-64). Hemingway's early letters were delivered to the local press by his parents, and Hemingway's subsequent letters were surely written under the apprehension that they might well find a public audience.

No doubt Hemingway did find things in his wounding and in his hospital stay in which he could take comfort. Even this sort of ordeal, with all its attendant pains and fears, had its compensations in social status and new experience. But about his wounding and convalescence, several facts are not in dispute. He underwent surgery, he picked many pieces of shrapnel from his legs, and, thanks largely to his drinking, he was hit with a case of jaundice. Hemingway was, by several accounts, the life of the party on the hospital floor, full of still adolescent vigor, and his letters home are indeed chipper, but he was not a fool incapable of comprehending the gravity of his situation or of feeling his injuries.³

Crews and Lynn do not mention Agnes von Kurowsky's statement that, while hospitalized, Hemingway “was worried about his leg. He was afraid they'd amputate” (qtd. in Reynolds, “Agnes Tapes” 269) nor that as late as 22 April 1920, he straightforwardly explained to his parents that although his leg was in pretty good shape, it still bothered him after a hard day—a long recovery time for a young and active man. An early attempt at a fictionalized version of his wounding develops a decidedly unspritely rhetoric. Writing longhand on Milan Red Cross stationery, Hemingway sketches the downfall of Nick Grainger of Petoskey, Michigan. Like Hemingway, Nick has been struck in the legs by a mortar on the Italian front. Yet, his case is worse than Hemingway's in that he apparently has lost both his legs and his left arm to amputation. The war over, peace celebrants noisy in the streets, Nick bitterly fingers his medals and remains uncomforted by the florid citation that accompanies them. The sketch ends before he swallows the poisonous bichloride solution he has filched for the clear purpose of committing suicide (JFK 604). As a piece of fiction—corny dialogue, unrealized ironic potential—this sketch provides a baseline from which to measure Hemingway's growth as a writer during his subsequent Paris apprenticeship. And the sketch is an early instance of the suicide theme that would become central in Hemingway's life and fiction. Most to the point here, this particular piece of writing directly refutes the revisionists' thesis that the war contained no dark dimension for the young Hemingway. And nowhere in the revised version of Hemingway does one see mention of his confidences to his wife Hadley about his recurrent battle nightmares—this in 1923, five years after his wounding (Reynolds, Paris Years 203). Rather than recognize the mixed nature of Hemingway's wounding, Crews and Lynn insist on depicting a sort of dumb (but cheerful) ox, all the while ignoring the cultural context of his behavior as well as much evidence that would necessitate a less one-dimensional portrait of Hemingway.

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 I 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.

Lynn and Crews undermine their arguments by staging false dilemmas. Either Hemingway immediately and constantly showed the profound effects of the war upon him, or he came out of the war untouched. Either the psychic germ of “Big Two-Hearted River” is World War I or it is Hemingway's conflicts with his mother (Lynn's argument, as we shall see), but not both. But those who have known or worked with veterans know that the effects of trauma may surface only after the passage of time, sometimes gradually, sometimes by fits and starts, sometimes all at once upon actuation by a particular stimulus, sometimes after the passage of many seemingly trouble-free years.⁶ Likewise, understanding the effects of one's wounding is a process, often one that transpires over many years, even decades. There is no single, exclusive paradigm that invariably governs the effects of traumatic experience.⁷ It is certainly reasonable to conclude that Hemingway suffered the effects of his wounding to a degree at first (and I wish to re-emphasize to a greater degree than acknowledged by Crews or Lynn), and that with the passage of time he came to a deeper awareness and a better understanding of the war's effects upon him. It is reasonable to accept that the reaction to a wounding need not come in a simple either/or form, that a wounding survived can leave victims feeling alternatively vulnerable and indestructible, and that the balance between these two feelings is quite capable of shifting over the course of one's life.

It is true that in the 1950s Hemingway actually denied the war-wound interpretation of his work as put forth by Philip Young. But Hemingway's objections in this instance were partly strategic. He wished to hold prying biographers and critics—of whom there were beginning to be a substantial number—at bay, and he was not about to encourage any public version of himself that did not conform to the hairy-chested hero regularly depicted in the pages of national magazines. In his letters of the period he repeatedly asserts his desire to retain his privacy and to have his fictions read on their own terms, without reference to facts from his own life. In part these assertions stem from sincere beliefs about his art and in part they stem from Hemingway's heavy investment in the macho myth that adhered to his life in the fifties.⁸

On the subject of his own biography, Hemingway had mixed feelings and was capable of combining subtle encouragement with openly expressed discouragement in his letters to would-be biographers and critics.⁹ In Young's particular case, Hemingway does not deny that he was traumatized in WWI, but rightly sees the critic as oversimplifying the oeuvre and overplaying his critical thesis. There had been “plenty [of] trauma in 1918,” he admitted to Harvey Breit, complaining that Young dwells on the trauma, rather than the fact that he had managed to overcome it (Selected Letters 865-67). By this time, too, the public Hemingway, “’fraid o’ nothing,” had firmly seized hold of a large segment of the casual public's imagination and of its subject's own self-conception as well. The truths Hemingway told in his fictions battled with the Life-magazine myth, which was to a large extent of his own making. Hemingway's letters do demonstrate his ability to prevaricate, pose, and manipulate. They also show him to be sincere and straightforward in many instances. Hemingway's 1948 assertion of war trauma to Cowley should be taken at its word. For one thing, what he says in his letter runs counter to the public persona he had participated in building, and, as we shall see, there is a great deal of evidence to be gathered from his statements and fictional works of the twenties that supports his retrospective self-assessment.

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 8—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 protagonists—including 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:

Perhaps, then, the “other needs” Nick feels he has put behind him include a need to please his mother, while his talk of his tent as his home may represent a reaction to being thrown out of his parents' summer cottage. Perhaps, too, the burned-over country and the grasshoppers that have turned black from living in it constitute tacit reminders to him of his mother's penchant for burning things. And finally, the activity of his mind that keeps threatening to overwhelm his contentment could be his rage [towards his mother].

(Hemingway 103-04)

This argument is consistent with a dominant tendency in Lynn's study: that the conflicts in Hemingway's stories have their source in his own psychic turmoil, that he had little understanding of, often little awareness of, the nature of his rages and inner torments. Lynn's method is at once subtle and mechanical. It is subtle in that it combines detailed biographical research with sophisticated readings of the works and exhibits the critic's high powers of inference. Yet Lynn too often uses his subtle insights less than responsibly. Lynn's conditional rhetoric here (“perhaps,” “may,” “perhaps,” “could be”) would seem to indicate that his reading of this enigmatic story is as speculative as any other, as indeed it is. But in the course of his argument, Lynn actually treats his speculation as if it were a fact beyond dispute—witness his excoriation of those whose speculations are not in line with his own. Lynn's method becomes mechanical in that it insists upon the equation inner torment equals content of the story, while assertive, consciously controlled, fictive imagination is relegated to the end of the bench.

In light of the vitriolic opinions expressed about his mother by Hemingway as an older man, it is perhaps difficult to judge his 1920 fights with her as merely typical of a twenty-year-old's desire to be granted autonomy and adult status. Lynn clearly does not judge them so, but rather presents them as being manifestations of a mind already abnormally conflicted in regards to his mother. But surely the war itself was an integral part of Hemingway's conflict with the old-fashioned, sanctimonious, emotionally coercive Grace. Surely it was doubly difficult in his particular situation to be treated like a kid. It was the summer of his coming of age, a stage of life when the final thrust towards independence and adult status is normal and necessary. But also, as a young man who had been at the war and one-time city-beat reporter in Kansas City, he had already seen much more than someone his age would usually see, and he had experienced things far beyond the ken of his suburban, essentially Victorian parents. The same mother who had initially doted on her son's war-hero status overlooked the deeper changes his experiences had caused in him.¹⁰ In an unpublished letter to Charles Poore, Hemingway relates that after being home from the war for some time “I was having a pretty bad time and my mother started to eat me out for drinking and not taking things seriously etc. and I told her that I had had a sort of bad time some of the time in the war and that if she would leave me alone I would work out of it okay.” In his description of Hemingway's summers of familial discontent, Lynn again presumes a false dilemma—it was either the war (wrong interpretation) or his mother (correct interpretation) that was at the root of Hemingway's—and hence Nick's—restlessness and moodiness. That the two problems could be mixed together, as they skillfully are in fictional form in “Soldier's Home,” for example, is an idea that Lynn never entertains.

But another problem confronts the reader. Lynn, who too readily formulates biographical statements about Hemingway based on material in the stories, seems to be operating with two sets of standards. Those who interpret “Big Two-Hearted River” to be a story about a war-wounded Nick are admonished three times in the space of two pages that there is no textual evidence for this interpretation—as indeed there is not (Hemingway 104-106). Yet Lynn remains unruffled by the fact that neither is there a single reference to Nick's conflicted feelings towards his mother. The story certainly contains no reference to Nick's “being thrown out of his parents' summer cottage,” as Lynn states, conferring a fact from Hemingway's life onto his protagonist. Indeed, there are no explicit references to familial strife of any kind.

Not only can Lynn be hoist on his own critical petard, he often engages in a sort of circular logic that too readily muddles Hemingway's characters with himself. It is often very hard to discern whether or not Lynn is basing a textual interpretation on Hemingway's life or an interpretation of Hemingway using a story as evidence. He moves back and forth without drawing careful distinctions between these procedures. While using biographical evidence to suggest (though it can never prove) a certain textual interpretation is legitimate criticism, to work in the other direction, to draw conclusions about the author's life based upon his characters is a more dubious approach, and one from which Hemingway has too often suffered. While Lynn is a subtle reader, his readings are often much more an exploration of Hemingway's frame of mind (invariably angry, guilty, depressed or sexually confused in his version of things) during composition than they are textual interpretations. Lynn's criticisms of his war-wound predecessors, then, prove nothing aside from his willingness to engage in a critical double standard.¹¹

What sort of textual evidence can be brought to bear on the story qua wound story? Its placement in the context of In Our Time strongly argues in favor of its interpretation as a story informed by the war. This volume contains seven stories and one vignette wherein Nick Adams is indisputably the protagonist. The stories occur in chronological order and trace various stages in Nick's development. In the sole vignette he is a soldier on the Italian front and has been hit in the spine. He is dragged to safety amidst the wreckage of a war-ruined town (later recalled in the imagery of Seney's obliteration in “Big Two-Hearted River”) and addresses his comrade in arms with the words “not patriots” (63). In “Cross-Country Snow,” which is the penultimate Nick Adams story, Nick refers to having a bad leg that interferes with his ability to ski. From these clues alone it is not reckless to hypothesize that Nick's unspecified problems in the ultimate story may have their origins in the war. Moreover, the reader has already also read “Soldier's Home” before reading “Big Two-Hearted River,” and this story is a quintessential, explicit portrait of a traumatized veteran, a portrait that paves the way for the reader to conjecture similar causes for the wounded veteran Nick's problems. Yet Lynn, as he does with “Big Two-Hearted River,” analyzes “Soldier's Home” only in terms of family dynamics (Hemingway 258-60). Clearly mother-son dynamics are of great importance in “Soldier's Home,” but the story's sine qua non is the depiction of a war veteran struggling to readjust to post-war civilian life. The family tensions cannot be seen as an issue somehow distinct from Krebs's status as a returned soldier. Thus, when the reader comes to the next story about a man he knows to be, like Krebs, both troubled and a veteran, he is surely justified in hypothesizing a thematic unity between the two stories and in positing the war as the underlying cause of the veteran's troubles.

Crews goes so far as to assert that in “Big Two-Hearted River” Nick is not even troubled: “Nick Adams neither moves about nor thinks like a man who has recently undergone a physically and spiritually crippling trauma. His escape, through the satisfactions of expert camping and fishing, from an unstated preoccupation is all but complete” (96) While it is true that the source of Nick's inner turmoil is never explicitly revealed, Hemingway's rendering of Nick's delicate mental state and his evocation of the precarious balance Nick strives to maintain are among Hemingway's finest achievements. To miss them is to miss the story. And as for Nick's “escape” being “all but complete,” Crews avoids any mention of the swamp, an obvious and dominant symbol, which Nick does not feel up to challenging at the end of the story.

Finally, it should be stated that the imagery of “Big Two-Hearted River” is consistent with the war-trauma reading. As he did in the earlier Nick Adams story “The End of Something,” Hemingway begins “Big Two-Hearted River” with a descriptive paragraph which does not advance the action of the story in the least, but which serves as an objective correlative for the story's emotional landscape. In the former story, Hemingway prepares the reader for the breakup of Nick and Marjorie in his opening paragraph, which is devoted entirely to a description of the ghost town Hortons Bay. In the opening paragraphs of “Big Two-Hearted River,” Hemingway similarly focuses his attention on the burned-over landscape through which Nick walks on his way to a better place. This imagery is consistent with other post-war literary wasteland imagery and touches the cultural memory of the devastated landscapes of the First World War.

In stories written subsequent to “Big Two-Hearted River,” Nick's career as a soldier receives further amplification. If literary quality is a register of how deeply an author has felt the subject matter about which he writes, then Hemingway felt very deeply about his war experiences, for these are some of his finest stories. They are “In Another Country,” “Now I Lay Me,” and “A Way You'll Never Be.” The first story very clearly anticipates A Farewell to Arms in its opening paragraph, its setting and the themes it raises. It depicts the ruined lives of wounded soldiers in a hospital, in particular the physical therapy of the American narrator and an Italian major.¹² It is clear that the physical therapy is useless and that some sort of metaphysical, perhaps spiritual, therapy would be more fundamentally valuable for the psychically battered men. The second story, as stated above, depicts Nick and an Italian soldier lying awake at night near the front, unable to sleep. The American narrator dreads sleeping because he fears that his soul will leave his body. The final story depicts Nick Adams returning to the Italian front as a would-be morale booster, but he has been shot, receiving a head-wound that has rendered him barely able to control himself at the front. Indeed, his principal task is to hold onto his sanity.

These three war stories are remarkable for their literary quality, for their high degree of autobiographical resonance, and for the way they illuminate A Farewell to Arms and each other. Most to the immediate purpose, however, is to assert that they constitute additional early evidence that Nick Adams was severely traumatized by the war. Lynn and Crews build a version of Hemingway as a world-renowned, middle-aged author pulling the wool over the eyes of friends and critics during the forties and fifties. Twenty-five years after the fact, they maintain, Hemingway fabricates the idea that the war affected him. Yet “In Another Country” and “Now I Lay Me” were composed only two years after “Big Two-Hearted River,” and “A Way You'll Never Be” was composed in mid-1932.¹³ These are Nick Adams stories; they are set at the war; they show Nick as physically and psychically wounded. The opening pages of “Now I Lay Me” even echo many particulars of “Big Two-Hearted River,” including the central action of trout fishing as psychic restoration. Clearly these stories cast what Cowley called “a retrospective light” on “Big Two-Hearted River” (“Nightmare” 41).¹⁴ Lynn and Crews require us to assume that these stories, some of Hemingway's finest explorations of the human consequences of war, were written so that he would have the means to delude English professors twenty-five years later. And if we are asked to accept this, would we then also be asked to assume that Hemingway discussed his war nightmares with his first wife in the 1920s for the same reason? Hemingway as both young and middle-aged man undoubtedly kidded, exaggerated, misled, pulled legs, manipulated, hoaxed, and lied. But the existence of these early war stories and their high degree of interconnectedness with “Big Two-Hearted River” argues strongly against the idea that Hemingway decided to lay claim to the importance of the war in his work belatedly and factitiously.

In viewing Hemingway's life, Lynn and Crews have noted his blind spots and his ability to deceive and manipulate but have then gone on to see blindness and manipulation where they do not exist. In the fictions they have sought in some instances to deny the seemingly obvious, and instead of contenting themselves with opening up additional avenues of criticism have tried to do so at the expense of closing down entirely legitimate interpretations already in existence. It must be emphasized in the face of this recent and much discussed and much-believed-in psychobiographical criticism that the First World War had a profound effect upon the life and work of Ernest Hemingway, and that the war looms large below the surface of “Big Two-Hearted River.”

Notes

1. While a more balanced set of views exists within the small community of experienced Hemingway scholars, wherein Lynn was greeted with more skepticism and wherein the more traditional view of the war's impact on Hemingway was not so readily abandoned, outside this small community of scholars one observes Lynn's considerable influence. Invariably if the graduate students I have taught have read any secondary literature on Hemingway, it has been Lynn, and just as invariably they are much taken with his conclusions. At conferences, in the faculty lounge, out of the mouths of those who are teaching Hemingway in survey classes, one hears the new version of Hemingway according to Lynn. Even within the ranks of modernist scholars, not only does Lynn's insistently psychoanalytical approach attract its supporters, but a good many of his specific conclusions, including those arrived at through a tendentious methodology, are apt to be referred to approvingly. The readiness to accept Lynn's version of Hemingway can be seen partly as a sign of the scholarly times, which for some years have been much in favor of debunking and chopping the author down to size. Certain scholarly methodologies and not a few critical careers have been built upon the attitude that the critic is every bit as wise as the author—indeed, wiser. When critics and their readers do not consider or are not aware of all the pertinent facts, this sort of spurious wisdom becomes entrenched if allowed to go unchallenged.

2. This 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.

3. The 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. Reynold's First War retains scholarly value as well.

4. Later 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).

5. In 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).

6. See especially Lansky, Peterson and Solomon.

7. Observations 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.

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

9. All 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.

11. 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.

12. While 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.

13. For 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.

14. Besides Cowley, critics who have linked the later war stories with “Big Two-Hearted River” include Young, DeFalco, Waldhorn and Flora.

Works Cited

Beegel, Susan F. “The Critical Reputation of Ernest Hemingway.” The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway. Ed. Scott Donaldson. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. 269-299.

Blank, Arthur S. “The Longitudinal Course of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.” Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: DSM-IV and Beyond. Ed.

Jonathan R. T. Davidson and Edna B. Foa. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1993. 3-22.

Brian, Denis. The True Gen: An Intimate Portrait of Ernest Hemingway by Those Who Knew Him. New York: Grove, 1988.

Clipp, Elizabeth Colerick and Glenn H. Elder. “The Aging Veteran of World War II: Psychiatric and Life Course Insights.” Aging and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Ed. Paul E. Ruskin and John A. Talbott. Washington DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1996. 19-52.

Cowley, Malcolm. “Hemingway's Wound—And Its Consequences for American Literature.” The Georgia Review Summer 1984: 223-39.

———. “Nightmare and Ritual in Hemingway.” Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays. Twentieth-Century Views Series.Ed. Robert P. Weeks. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962. 40-51. [Originally published as the Introduction to The Portable Hemingway. New York: Viking, 1945.]

Crews, Frederick. The Critics Bear it Away: American Fiction and the Academy. New York: Random House, 1992.

DeFalco, Joseph. The Hero in Hemingway's Short Stories. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1963.

Donaldson, Scott. “Introduction: Hemingway and Fame.” The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway. Ed Scott Donaldson. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. 1-15.

Flora, Joseph M. Hemingway's Nick Adams. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1982.

Hemingway, Ernest. Complete Poems. Lincoln: U of Nebraska, 1983.

———. In Our Time. 1925. New York: MacMillan, 1970.

———. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner's, 1981.

———. 88 Poems. Ed. Nicholas Gerogiannis. New York: Harcourt, 1979.

———. Letter to Charles Poore. 3 April 1953. American Heritage Center. University of Wyoming.

———. Letter to Clarence and Grace Hall Hemingway. 22 April 1920. Hemingway Room. John F. Kennedy Library.

———. The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. 1938. New York: MacMillan, 1986.

———. Unpublished manuscript #604. Hemingway Room. John F. Kennedy Library.

Hemingway, Leicester. My Brother, Ernest Hemingway. 1962. New York: Fawcett, 1967.

Lansky, Melvin R. and Carol R. Bley. Posttraumatic Nightmares: Psychodynamic Explorations. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1995.

Laufer, Robert S. “The Serial Self: War Trauma, Identity and Adult Development.” Human Adaptation to Extreme Stress. Ed. John P. Wilson et al. New York: Plenum, 1988. 33-53.

Lewis, R. W. B. “Who's Papa?” Rev. of Along With Youth: Hemingway the Early Years, by Peter Griffin and Hemingway: A Biography, by Jeffrey Meyers. The New Republic 2 Dec. 1985: 31-34.

Lewis, Robert W. Jr. “Hemingway in Italy: Making it Up.” Journal of Modern Literature 9 (1981): 209-36.

Lynn, Kenneth S. Hemingway. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

———. “Hemingway's Private War.” Commentary 72.1 (1981): 24-33.

McFarlane, Alexander C. “Resilience, Vulnerability, and the Course of Posttraumatic Reactions.” Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body and Society. Ed. Bessel A. van der Kolk et al. New York: Guilford, 1996. 155-181.

Mellow, James R. Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Harper, 1985.

Nagel, James. “Hemingway and the Italian Legacy.” Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky, Her Letters, and Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway. Eds. Henry S. Villard and James Nagel. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1989. 197-270.

Peterson, Kirtland, et al. “Subtypes and Course of the Disorder.” Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: A Clinician's Guide. New York: Plenum, 1991. 3-23.

Raeburn, John. Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as Public Writer. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.

Reynolds, Michael. “The Agnes Tapes.” Fitzgerald-Hemingway Annual (1979): 251-77.

———. Hemingway's First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976.

———. Hemingway: The Paris Years. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.

———. The Young Hemingway. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.

Sanford, Marcelline Hemingway. At the Hemingways: A Family Portrait. Boston: Little, Brown, 1961.

Solomon, Zahava. Combat Stress Reaction: The Enduring Toll of War. New York: Plenum, 1993.

Villard, Henry S. and James Nagel. Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky, Her Letters, and Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1989.

Waldhorn, Arthur. A Reader's Guide to Ernest Hemingway. New York: Farrar, 1972.

Wilson, Edmund. “Hemingway: Guage of Morale.” The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1947. 214-42.

Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. 1952. New York: Harcourt, 1966.