Dad's Maybe Book

by Tim O'Brien

  55

  Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (V)

  Over the past month and a half, Timmy and Tad and I have spent time reading and talking about Ernest Hemingway’s war stories. The boys did not care for them much.

  After finishing one of them, “Now I Lay Me,” Tad’s most energetic comment was “Can I go play now?”

  Timmy said, maybe perceptively, maybe not: “It was boring, but some of the boring parts were interesting.”

  “Which boring parts?” I asked.

  “I can’t remember,” said Timmy. “I was trying to figure out how worms can climb into trees.”

  I owe the boys an apology. They are too young.

  I had expected they might be curious about the things their father witnessed many decades ago as a young man at war. (They have yet to ask a single question.) I had also expected they might find common ground with the relative youth of Hemingway’s characters. Hemingway himself, at age eighteen, was not much older than my sons when he was badly wounded and nearly killed on the Austro-Italian front. When I mentioned this, Timmy shrugged and pointed out that Hemingway had forgotten to write about getting wounded and nearly killed in the story I had assigned. “Nothing happens,” Timmy said. “A wounded guy just lies around in a hospital, thinking about stuff. Nobody’s fighting anybody.”

  Timmy’s literary judgment, while severe, is not completely unfounded. The “war stories” of Ernest Hemingway contain almost no dramatic immersion in the sustained, slogging, minute-by-minute, here-and-now actualities of man killing man. By and large, the stories unfold well before or well after combat. We bump into Harold Krebs and Jake Barnes after, not in the midst of, their wartime horrors. In “Now I Lay Me,” we spend time with a sleepless Nick Adams after his having been “blown up,” and then, in the same story and in the space of a single combat-deleting sentence, we flash forward to rejoin Nick after he has been wounded once again. In “A Very Short Story”—a piece of writing I adore—and in chapter 6 of In Our Time, we get further glimpses of Nick after he has been wounded, but nearly without fail the terror and the pain and the physical experience of getting wounded are whisked well offstage. In “Big Two-Hearted River,” we encounter Nick in the Michigan wilds, fishing and camping at some indefinite point after his war has come to an end. In “On the Quai at Smyrna,” we see the refugees of war and the human costs of war, but the fighting itself is elsewhere. In one of his most affecting and enigmatic stories, “In Another Country,” Hemingway’s opening sentence bluntly declares for itself a separate peace: “In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.” Hemingway and his narrator are true to their word. The story does not go to war. In “The Butterfly and the Tank,” the Spanish Civil War is located literally down the street from Chicote’s bar, where the story’s action unfolds and where people drink and gossip and trade rumors while the fighting occurs in another place, almost in another country. In “A Way You’ll Never Be,” we hear Nick Adams discussing an “attack” in which he’d participated, but the attack itself is never presented to us, nor is the killing, nor is the ugliness of battle, nor is the physical and emotional chaos of men killing other men. Nick’s sympathies are entirely devoted to himself, to his own courage and comportment under fire, and not at all to the dead and maimed.

  Similarly, in chapters 3 and 4 of In Our Time, Nick reports “potting” German soldiers as they try to climb a garden wall. The “potting” is accomplished at a distance of forty yards; Nick is not under fire himself. Like any reader, of course, I bring my own life to and into a piece of fiction, and like Timmy and Tad, I can’t help but view the “potting” of enemy soldiers from a distance of forty yards as a pretty sterile and risk-free military enterprise. It is a far cry from what I remember as combat. To me, “potting” sounds like target practice, and Nick Adams does not appear to care, even a little, that his targets are human.

  In A Farewell to Arms, we see Frederic Henry preparing for war, reflecting on war, injured by war, fleeing from war, haunted by war, and wearied by war, but only for a modest number of pages do we see much of Henry in the war, and even then he is located not in battle but rather on the outskirts of battle, listening to the thud of artillery off in the distance, watching troops plod grimly toward the front. Frederic Henry is removed from the ferocity of slug-it-out, kill-or-die combat; he is exempt from the commission of wholesale butchery; he does not spend his days and nights killing people. It is true that Henry sometimes finds himself in danger, and it is also true that he is seriously wounded, but he is wounded as a witness would be wounded, by freakish bad luck, by an artillery round fired from a great distance as he returns from seeking a topping for his pasta.

  Along the same lines, in a story called “Night Before Battle,” Hemingway’s narrator tells the reader: “Below us a battle was being fought . . . [At] eight hundred to a thousand yards the tanks looked like small mud-colored beetles bustling in the trees and spitting tiny flashes and the men behind them were toy men who lay flat, then crouched and ran.” Although at one point small arms fire strikes uncomfortably close to the story’s narrator, he experiences warfare at considerable remove, enough so that tanks look like beetles and human beings look like toys, and the narrator complains that the combat he has been witnessing is “too far to film well.” Again, Hemingway’s protagonist is not in battle; he is a spectator to battle. He is a cameraman. Killing people is neither his job nor his spiritual burden.

  To be sure, a notable exception to this sort of “distancing” occurs at the conclusion of For Whom the Bell Tolls, during which Hemingway’s protagonist Robert Jordan is immersed in deadly combat. Jordan, however, is a specialist working on his own authority with a small band of partisans; he is physically removed from his own army; he is removed from the repetitive, merciless, day-by-day experience of the common soldier; he is subject only to such discipline as he chooses to impose on himself; he is free to spend his nights—and portions of his days—romancing young Maria; he sleeps not in a trench, not in a foxhole, but instead on earth that occasionally moves; he has been distanced, as few ordinary soldiers are, from the grueling and ceaselessly terrifying frontline duties endured by millions of young men in Flanders and along the Somme. For me, these consciously constructed circumstances, along with Jordan’s Walt-Disney-at-the-Alamo final moments, combine to produce the impression of war as romance, both literal and figurative. It is an example of what Wilfred Owen called “The old Lie.”

  Hemingway’s insulation of his characters from repetitive up-close combat—physical distancing, emotional distancing, the distancing of imagery, the distancing of time—cannot be accounted for by chance alone. A biographer, with a biographer’s sometimes single-minded loyalty to biography, might argue that Hemingway, the man, the author, had not seen combat as a fighting and killing participant on the Italian front, and therefore, for biographical reasons, he may have avoided efforts to depict that which he did not intimately “know.” Certain critics suggest that several of Hemingway’s so-called war stories, including “Big Two-Hearted River” and “Now I Lay Me,” are not fundamentally war stories at all. Literary historian Frederick Crews writes: “Nothing in [Hemingway’s] 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.” In his consideration of “Now I Lay Me,” biographer Kenneth Lynn also dismisses, or at least radically deemphasizes, the importance of Hemingway’s wartime experience. “What counts supremely in the story,” Lynn writes, “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.”

  In any event, during his time on the Italian front, Hemingway had not shot people in the face. He had not advanced through mud under heavy machine-gun fire. At night, after performing his Red Cross duties, he had returned to the relative safety of the rear area, where he’d slept under a roof and enjoyed running water and hot meals and maybe a
drink or two with friends—impossible luxuries for the common grunt. Although Hemingway had volunteered for duty, and although he had apparently comported himself with steady nerves, it is nonetheless true that he would be viewed by the frontline infantryman as a stalwart, honorable, but unmistakable noncombatant. He was a REMF.

  And it was not just relative comfort that separated Ernest Hemingway from the grunts along the Piave River. He also retained considerable freedom of will. He could have chosen, without conspicuous dishonor, to retreat under fire. He could’ve hopped on his bicycle and pedaled for the rear. Not that Hemingway did. Not that he wanted to. But he could have. Hemingway had joined the American Red Cross, not the American army, and so he was not shackled to war in the way soldiers are shackled. In the moments before battle, the common grunt experiences a strange giving up of the self, an almost physical forfeiture of volition. Even in seemingly trivial ways, a soldier’s freedom of will begins to shrivel into an impossible fantasy: to turn left or to turn right; to sit down or to stand up; to speak or not to speak; to advance under fire or not to advance. The young Ernest Hemingway, as an ambulance driver and canteen worker, enjoyed far greater individual agency than the men to whom he distributed his cigarettes and chocolate.

  Finally, of course, Hemingway was excused as a young man from the burden of dispensing death. During his service in the Great War, and up until his disputed (and probably exaggerated) experience as a correspondent during World War Two, he was spared not only the killing but the lifelong aftershocks of killing. As a consequence, a peculiar and very narrow self-absorption runs through his stories set in wartime. He writes frequently and well about his heroes’ fear of death and about the oppressively relentless atmosphere of death in a time and place of war—all that symbolic rain—but Hemingway writes rarely and not so well about dealing death, or about later dealing with dealing death. There is little sense of “otherness” in his so-called war stories. There is little guilt. There is no stunned amazement. There is no revulsion. There is no sick giddiness. There is precious little moral doubt or moral qualm or moral culpability. Abruptly and inexplicably, for instance, Frederic Henry pulls his pistol and shoots a fleeing Italian sergeant during the retreat from Caporetto. Why? Because the man is fleeing? If so, why not shoot the entire fleeing Italian army? Why not shoot the fleeing horses and the fleeing ambulances and the fleeing hangers-on? Why not shoot himself? (He, too, is fleeing.) More strikingly—rationality aside, rectitude aside, explicability aside—Frederic Henry may as well have shot a plastic duck at a carnival. “I opened up my holster, took the pistol, aimed at the one who had talked the most, and fired. I missed and they both started to run. I shot three times and dropped one.” (That word “dropped”—so morally dull, so drained of human affect.) A few moments later, when one of Henry’s companions attempts to “finish” the wounded man, the pistol doesn’t fire and Henry says, “You have to cock it,” and his companion cocks it and fires twice and the wounded man is no longer wounded, he is very dead, and Henry thinks nothing and says nothing, though he thinks and says a great, great deal about wartime death in general. “The sergeant lay in his dirty long-sleeved underwear. I got up with Piani and we started. We were going to try to cross the field.”

  I suspect that, for Ernest Hemingway, style trumped all in this murderous episode. The bewildering absence of emotion seems to me false. It is artifice. It is the famous iceberg, perhaps, but it is the iceberg of Jeffrey Dahmer.

  More than that, I think a great and understandable fear drove Hemingway to shy away from the subjectivities of human emotion, subjectivities that may have seemed to him incompatible with the demands of realism. Sorrow is never hard and fast in the way a cocked pistol is hard and fast. Revulsion, as a state of mind, cannot be seen or touched. Pity cannot be held in the hand. The affective aspects of human consciousness swirl like gas, expanding and contracting, mixing with contradictory aspects, and they cannot be described with the exactitude a writer may bring to the description of rivers and rain and dust and cocked pistols. In fact, even when Frederic Henry reflects on his own wounding, his thoughts are almost entirely drained of emotion. And when Robert Jordan confronts his own death at the conclusion of For Whom the Bell Tolls, his final earthly thoughts emerge as weirdly stilted and pompously formal, as if perhaps he is struggling to keep his own terrors and uncertainties secret even from himself.

  * * *

  “So why,” Timmy asked me, “do you make such a big deal about Ernest Hemingway? You don’t even seem to like his stuff all that much.”

  “I hate it,” I said, “and I love it.”

  “Both?”

  “That can happen with stories. You can love some parts and hate other parts.”

  “But why do you care? Why make us keep reading all this stuff?”

  “Because I want you to know me,” I said. “Because Hemingway thinks about things I think about.”

  “Except you don’t agree with him.”

  “Not always. Sometimes.”

  “Like when?”

  “Well, like when Nick lies listening to the silkworms at night. When he thinks about leaving the world forever.”

  “Dying, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  * * *

  Hemingway’s literary ground zero—his obsession, his passion—is located not in warfare but in death itself: premonitions of death, brushes with death, meditations on death, dalliances with death, fear of death, hatred of death, mockery of death, resignation to death, and an abiding awareness of all those silkworms relentlessly munching away in the dark. For me, this is where the beauty of Hemingway’s fiction resides. This is where I believe him.

  True, I’m repulsed by what appears to be a pathological insensitivity to the man-killing-man aspects of warfare, but at the same time I’m spellbound by the subtlety, grace, immediacy, and reverence with which those same stories and novels treat the theme of human mortality. This, if anything, is Hemingway’s subject. Not war. Not bullets, not bombs, not artillery rounds. Not the politics of war. Not the machinery of war and not the morality of war. For Ernest Hemingway, I’m pretty sure, war was most essentially an extension of the natural world, a world that promises only its own conclusion. He was using war, not just writing about war, as a means of exploring the fate of all living things, you included, your children included, the innocent and the guilty and the jury included. “Every man’s life ends the same way,” Hemingway wrote. He also wrote: “Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.” Famously, in Death in the Afternoon, he wrote: “The only place where you could see life and death, i.e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.” In the same book, which dwells in sometimes rhapsodic detail on the demise of bulls and horses and men, he wrote that he wished to study death “as a man might, for instance, study the death of a father.” In A Farewell to Arms, he put into the mouth of Frederic Henry a poetic couplet by Andrew Marvell: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.” In “A Natural History of the Dead” (the title makes my point) he wrote: “Let us therefore see what inspiration we may derive from the dead,” after which the reader is treated to an exhaustive and anatomically enlightening survey of dead mules and horses and human beings, along with commentary such as: “The dead grow larger each day until sometimes they become quite too big for their uniforms, filling these until they seem blown tight enough to burst.” Elsewhere, Hemingway wrote: “Before the war you always think that it’s not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.” He wrote: “The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.” After his grave wounding near the Piave River, he told a friend: “I died then. I fel
t my soul or something coming right out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner. It flew around and then came back and went in again and I wasn’t dead any more.” And about his own life he wrote: “When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me.”

  My eyes shift back to the preceding line, to the words “all men.” Hemingway did not write “men at war.” He wrote “all men.” He was reaching beyond war. He was reaching into his youth and into his old age, and into your youth and into your old age, to rediscover the shocking certainty that what now exists will one day not exist, that for all of us the lights will go out and the café will close its doors.

  What most of us wish to forget, Hemingway cannot help but remember.

  What most of us press away, Hemingway embraces.

  This, if only for me, is where the triumph of his best stories is found; his reach is inclusive; his subject is everyone and everything, the planet, the setting sun, the little girl with a brain tumor, the father contemplating a bottle of vodka, the silkworms munching away in the dark.

  In this regard, Hemingway’s so-called war fiction seems to me indistinguishable from the greater body of his fiction, those novels and stories which on the surface are not in the least about war but which are nonetheless permeated by, preoccupied with, and wholly conscious of a crouching and pitiless finality—“The Capital of the World,” “Indian Camp,” “An African Story,” “The Undefeated,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Killers,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “A Day’s Wait,” “My Old Man,” “The Faithful Bull,” “An Alpine Idyll,” “After the Storm,” “Banal Story,” “The Good Lion,” “Fathers and Sons,” The Old Man and the Sea, Across the River and into the Trees, Islands in the Stream. These stories and novels, some more than others, each in its own time-ticking way, are of a piece with Hemingway’s “war fiction,” reminding us of what we know but try so furiously, so hopelessly, not to know.