July 8 is the anniversary of nearly-19-year-old Ernest Hemingway becoming one of the first Americans wounded in World War I. There are a few things that ought to be said about that, including some from the other side, from Hemingway himself.
March 3, 2013
Have been re-reading Charles A. Fenton’s wonderful book, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway, published in 1954.
All accounts agree that young Hemingway was a tremendously sensitive, complicated organism. And then, shortly after mid night, July 8, 1918, an Austrian shell hit the front-line trench where he was distributing chocolates and cigarettes to the Italian soldiers. Two men next to him were killed. He was wounded by more than 200 pieces of shrapnel. Being wounded in the middle of the night, a couple of weeks before your 19th birthday, is not the kind of thing that leaves you unscathed. If nothing else, it is going to shatter your assumption of your own mortality,
Elementary, but in those seemingly innocent days, nearly 100 years ago now, nobody had heard of post-traumatic-stress syndrome, nor of combat fatigue. They knew of shell-shock, but they hadn’t yet learned that its effects could last a lifetime. Two brief excerpts make a point that is often lost:
“[Hemingway’s friend Carl] Edgar was much impressed by the impact the war had so evidently made on Hemingway. `He came back,’ Edger once said, `figuratively as well as literally shot to pieces.’ Edger concluded that the intensity of Hemingway’s desire to write was directly connected to the war. `He seemed to have a tremendous need to express the things that he had felt and seen.’ (p. 72)
Many years later, Hemingway friend Bill Horne said ,“`Hemingway, to my own certain knowledge,’ never threw off his experiences in the war.’” (p. 73)
Hemingway was the first American to be wounded in Italy. [One had been killed, but Hemingway was the first to be wounded and survive.] Months of recuperation among veterans followed, as did the experience of falling in love and being jilted.
An Industrial Accident
Wednesday, March 9, 2011, 4:20 AM. Papa, using this cane yesterday and this morning [having injured an ankle in a trivial accident], I was thinking about you. It was romantic, that limping around — but it wasn’t only romantic.
No, it wasn’t only romantic. It was a damn nuisance, as well. And it was a loss that was bearable because it had meaning as an honorable war wound. Only with the coming of time did I start to feel it as an industrial accident, and then saw the other woundeds as equally the result of industrial accidents, regardless of their valor — an important point people often miss. And from there it became possible to see the entire war not as a crusade of right versus wrong — which is how it had been sold to us, how we had sold it to ourselves — but as one colossal industrial accident that had maimed us for no particular reason.
If you understand how I came to see it that way, you’ll understand better my attitude toward the second world war. I went into that one without illusions. The men at war were a fascinating phenomenon, and the war had to be won, but as evil as the Nazis were, they were only evil in a different way from the people running England and France, not to mention Russia and the little dictatorships all over Europe. The little countries weren’t so much to blame, but their sufferings were as much the result of geography and history as of anybody’s evil intent. You might say that the invasion of Belgium both times, and Holland and Denmark and all, the second time, were another form of industrial accident.
That’s a lot of insight to get from your wounding.
From my wounding, but also from some reporting for the [Toronto] Star after my wounding. The Turkish war showed me World War I in miniature and in retrospect. It is all there in Farewell To Arms and The Sun Also Rises, but you have to be able to see that my perceptions were neither simple-minded nor trendy nor the party line. And God knows, I wasn’t advocating that anybody live like Brett or Mike or even Jake. I was just describing the emotional aftermath of one giant industrial accident.
With time it became clear that this accident was still in progress. As you’ve seen and see and are going to continue to see. It’s hard to get too excited about Progress and the Rights Of Man and the Victory of this or that principle, when you see that it is mostly illusion on some people’s part and deception on other people’s part and what you would call general unconsciousness on everybody’s part living through it. It’s just that I was wounded so quickly that I had just what I had wanted when I shipped out! I was a hero, or as much of a hero as you can be when you are wounded out of the blue — or out of the black, to be more accurate — with no combat involved.
And isn’t that how nearly all the boys and men were injured and killed, after all? If you are torn apart — a little bit or extensively or entirely — by high explosive thrown at you from a distance, by somebody you never saw, who knew or cared nothing about you except maybe as an abstract representation of “the enemy” — the valor involved is entirely different from a cavalry charge, say, or a sword fight or even a duel of rifles at point-blank range. The soldiers saw it, whether the officers did or not, in the Civil War, 50 years earlier. Getting blown to bits by artillery fire while you hide from it in trenches was exactly what was happening in France and Italy in 1918. It was a world of difference from warfare as it existed in 1861, let alone in the Napoleonic era, say.
And when you were wounded you were a little embarrassed that you hadn’t been doing anything heroic.
Exactly. The experience didn’t match what we had been fed about it — mostly lies, of course, as usual in war — so at first I assumed there was something wrong with me. So, I dressed up the story to make it bearable, so I wouldn’t feel like a pretender.
You had to pretend to avoid feeling like a pretender.
Yeah, crazy, isn’t it? But I didn’t see it that clearly then, and maybe you weren’t so clear yourself when you were 19. The real soldiers, the ones who had gotten wounded after long service, saw through me at once when I paraded through all decorated. They knew, you see. I was still seeing through civilian eyes, and the eyes of a kid who had just arrived, like a new recruit in 1864 would have been among men who had been wounded at Gettysburg and were still recuperating, or who had just been wounded at Forts Hell and Damnation. They knew, and I didn’t, even though my industrial accident had given me a spurious membership in the club. It was okay for me to use the clubs facilities, but I was an honorary member, and they knew it and made it plain.
Now, it’s funny how life works. I was an innocent, though I didn’t quite realize it because I was such a fast learner. My few months as a reporter in Kansas City had given me enough of a peek into the lives of the men who kept things going, like police and firemen, and the lives of people who had had their own industrial accidents (though I didn’t think of them that way yet) that I thought I had become hard-boiled. I felt toughened and knowledgeable. And of course I was so green, so much living in image and illusion, and everyone around me knew it, but I didn’t know it.
So — I pretended my way through a succession of roles, altering the part as I went, learning from observation how the real heroes acted, figuring out how they felt, and mimicking them when safely not in their presence. This whole sequence was invaluable when I came to become a writer, for what is a writer of fiction if not somebody who gets inside somebody else’s skin and describes how the world looks from there?
And the result was that even when I was back home, or in Chicago, and I was still playing the role, I was feeling my way to a reevaluation of what I had expected to feel and what I really had felt; what I thought was the way things are, and what I had really found them to be. I pretended, or posed, maybe we should say, and it gave me cover, and with time I learned what had happened to me, and then I could start to express it.
I get that as others wrote their experiences, you learned from that too.
Well, sure. You think writers can always write and never read? Reading other people’s stuff is a prime window on their world, and some things are going to be obvious, and some you’ll reject and some are going to surprise you and lead you to think about things differently.
Thursday, April 29, 2010. I find myself recurrently thinking about — brooding on — Hemingway’s emotional life. I feel that I understand him as perhaps his biographers do not, quite. So, papa — what would you like to say about your life and/or reading and/or experiences.
I came out of the hospital in Italy as Jack London came out of the bars in the Klondike, with no first-hand experience, but a wealth of secondhand experience. After all, I had never fired a rifle at an opponent, and hadn’t even had the preliminary fear of going into combat. The shell that injured me was a bolt out of the blue to a boy who assumed his own invulnerability. So what I knew was pain and suffering and irrational fear. Everything else was second-hand; the life in the lines, the comradeship of arms, the mixtures of fears and courage that filled people at different times, the nature of the Italians.
I was on slightly more first-hand ground with the love affair, except I glamorized it, adding an older man’s perspective on a very young man’s experience. I killed Agnes as I had had to kill my love for her when she rejected me — but the emotions and experiences Frederick Henry had were those I learned much later in life than 18. So to that extent there is a fairytale element in the love story.
All right, I romanced, telling my story to the press and to my fellows at home. I told it as I dreamed it, rather than as it was. You could look at it as novelizing without the writing of it. But the things that I pretended had happened to me, I knew, even though secondhand.
I do see that. And of course you and I discussed this somewhat three years ago when I read The Young Hemingway while in England.
Well, this is the foundation for understanding my later life, you see. Not Paris, not my upbringing, not the things that happened in Spain and all. Being wounded without warning, being the first of the Americans in the hospital, listening for many months to the real veterans, being able to pretend I was a veteran too, and sort of feeling that because of my wounds, I was. And then knowing that I had a whole extra life to lead, for I could have been killed, even was killed, but came back –. This was the central experience of my life, and it came before I was 20.
[And, just for the record, for those people who think Hemingway liked war, this, which came to me out of nowhere on April 14, 2011, about Fukushima:. It was as if i could hear his voice: the words were quite plain. He said, “If you want to understand my attitude toward war, just combine your admiration for the men who are doing their heroic best [to clean up the mess] and your sympathy and pity for them and their families, with your anger and disgust at the decisions that made this all possible, and the people (and their motives) who made the decisions. Nothing is different.”]