Teaching Hemingway and War ed. by Alex Vernon (review)

With the publication of an edited collection such as Teaching Hemingway and War, it is perhaps easy to forget that Hemingway did not technically serve in the military, at least not in the traditional sense, nor did he actually take part in most of the military actions about which he writes. Despite his publishers’ best marketing efforts to the contrary, Hemingway himself never wanted his war literature to be taken strictly as “personal history.” In a letter dated New Year’s Eve of 1930, Hemingway expressed to Maurice Coindreau, who had translated A Farewell to Arms into French, his frustration with publishers’ desires to pitch his imaginative war literature as an historical war document:

I write fiction and I find that all publishers want biographical material only so they can use it to make your fiction seem a “document.” I do not claim even to have been in the war and it is impossible for me to furnish a military history to a publisher. If he wants to he can say that I served on the Italian front which is true enough and ample but I would prefer no military mention at all. I have forbidden Scribners ever to use any personal publicity because I want the stuff to be judged as fiction without any attempt to tie it up with documentation.

(Princeton University Libraries)

Beyond revealing the author’s growing awareness of his own public image, this letter points toward perhaps the biggest hurdle educators face in discussing the topic of war in Hemingway’s work with their students: the question of experience. As editor Alex Vernon puts it, “it is essential that students do not allow a lack of war or military experience impede their critical imaginative interactions,” reminding us that Hemingway himself learned “to trust his imagination in locating his war stories outside his personal history” (5). On one hand, then, teachers and students should not let their lack of war or military experience make them feel uncomfortable reading and discussing Hemingway’s war literature, nor, on the other hand, should they allow Hemingway’s own admitted experiential limitations to make them skeptical of his ability to produce narratives that can teach us much about the experience of war. More than just “documents” of his own war experiences, Hemingway’s fictions of war continue to fascinate and enthrall us, as we continue to enjoy new war-focused biographies such as Steven Florczyk’s Hemingway, the Red Cross, and the Great War (2013), Peter Moreira’s Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn (2007), as well as war-focused critical work like the collection War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway’s Early Life and Writings (2014, edited by Steve Paul, Gail Sinclair, and Steven Trout).

Teaching Hemingway and War adds a much-needed and tremendously useful pedagogical guide to this growing field. It includes fifteen original essays from a diverse set of contributors on how to approach Hemingway’s relationship to war in the classroom. Of these fifteen essays, the final section provides three outstanding undergraduate essays taken from a Hemingway seminar taught by Vernon at Hendrix College as examples of what students are capable of producing and as contributions to Hemingway studies in their own right.

Browsing the essays of this excellent collection, one is struck not only by the breadth of engagement with Hemingway’s oeuvre—the essays deal with his short stories, novels, nonfiction, and one film—but also with the wide range of approaches taken up by the collection’s contributors. From expected war-related texts like In Our Time, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, to less obvious choices like “Get a Seeing-Eyed Dog,” Death in the Afternoon, and Across the River and Into the Trees, these essays engage quite fully with Hemingway’s life’s work on war as well as on a variety of his war-time experiences. The collection is organized around four sections. The first three...