"Soldier's Home" Revisited: A Hemingway Mea Culpa
1993; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0039-3789
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
ResumoIn 1924, Ernest Hemingway six stories about Nick Adams and one about Harold Krebs. These Nick stories make heart of Adams chronology, ranging from early childhood in Indian Camp and Doctor and Doctor's Wife, through adolescence in End of Something and Three-Day Blow to returned veteran in Big Two-hearted River,' and culminating with married Nick, whose wife is pregnant in Cross Country Snow. At no other time in his career did Hemingway immerse himself so completely in creation of Nick Adams. While taking himself through an 11-month journey with Nick, Hemingway for some reason digressed into his only fictional visit to Oklahoma, to which Harold Krebs of Soldier's Home has returned after serving in Marines in France and Germany during and immediately after World War I. The primary purpose of this essay is to try to determine why for this one story Hemingway set Nick aside and created Krebs. In order to make this determination, I must develop a reading of Soldier's Home that is greatly different from (and, I believe, more defensible than) those previous critics have set forth. Looking at Soldier's Home within context of six Nick stories and within context of Hemingway's personal life and emotions in 1924 creates a different framework for a reading of what occurs within text of story. This new reading of story is based largely on an evaluation of Harold Krebs's role in Marines that, so far as I can discover, differs from any before.(1) One thing is certain about Hemingway's attitude toward Soldier's Home: he did not see it as inferior to Nick stories. On 15 August 1924, Hemingway told Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas that he had just finished writing a long fishing story in which everything was made up (Baker, Selected Letters 122). On 10 December of that same year, Hemingway to Robert McAlmon that he had just finished the best short story I ever wrote (Baker, Selected Letters 139). The first of these stories is Big Two-Hearted River; second is Soldier's Home. Certainly, critical opinion during last 69 years has tended to view story about Nick's going fishing as superior to one about Harold's coming home. Both stories concern same general subject: returned veteran, even if Nick's military experience is not mentioned. But, then, neither is Harold's. If we view Hemingway's own judgment about Soldier's Home more in terms of psychic relief writing brought to author and less in comparative aesthetic terms, perhaps we can understand why author was so enthusiastic about that story. I will argue here that Hemingway may very well have produced for himself in writing Soldier's Home something similar to psychic control that author created for Nick on his fishing trip in northern Michigan. Soldier's Home is author's carefully constructed mea culpa for lies he had told and for truths he had allowed press to distort regarding his own role, duties, and injury on Italian front in 1918.(2) Hemingway was as careful to avoid an open confession in writing Krebs's story as he was to avoid an account of Nick's reason for needing to go fishing. Two major questions I hope to answer are these: Why did this hidden apology for lies and distortions come in 1924, almost six years after Hemingway's own return home to Oak Park? Why does mea culpa take form of Harold Krebs's story rather than that of a Nick story? A partial answer to first of those two questions lies in circumstances of Hemingway's life in 1924. The six Nick stories and one Harold story were written during a year in which Hemingway was having to adjust to major change in his life and plans brought about by birth of his first son: experimenting with living with a baby he to Ezra Pound on 17 March. Baby hollers etc. Have tried to write but couldn't bring it off (Baker, Selected Letters 112). …
Referência(s)