War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway’s Early Life and Writings

Chapter 8: The Fragmented Origins of Ernest Hemingway’s “A Natural History of the Dead”

THe FragMenTed orIgIns oF ernesT HeMIngWaY’s “a naTural HIsTorY oF THe dead” Matthew Forsythe In early 1929, after returning to Key West from his father’s funeral, Ernest Hemingway interrupted his efforts to revise A Farewell to Arms and drafted a sketch about another wounded soldier on the Italian front.1 “In the mountains,” the scene opens, “the snow fell on the dead outside the dressing station” (Death in the Afternoon 141).2 The bodies are stored in a cave, where the unconscious man has been laid by mistake. Shot in the head yet still alive, he disturbs the silence of the tomb for “a day, a night, and a day.” The account emphasizes the characters troubled by the situation.3 Stretcher bearers pester the doctor, but the harried surgeon denies their request to move the man. He defends his inaction to an injured lieutenant, who advocates a morphine overdose. In the original manuscript, their conflict ends in a stalemate, and a brief dénouement leaves the fate of the dying man unresolved: “He was alive all the next day. By that time there was a report around that he was Christ” (quoted in Smith 231). Half dead in a tomb for three days, the soldier in the cave represents the anxiety created by a religious faith that cannot survive the horrors of war but refuses to disappear. Although labeled a fragment in the Kennedy Collection, the document can be read as an intact work, both as an artifact and a work of fiction. Other than its brevity, four manuscript pages but fewer than five hundred words, there is no obvious indication that Hemingway considered the 131 132 MATTHEW FORSYTHE narrative incomplete. The terse, vivid anecdote follows the basic structure he employed in other tales, moving from the opening exposition into a conflict relayed using conversation.4 Hemingway could have developed the scene into an independent story with little trouble, but he resumed his more immediate task, the work of refining the typescript of his second novel. A year later, A Farewell to Arms was published, and he returned to the account of the wounded soldier. He extended the conclusion, the fight between the doctor and the lieutenant, but retained most of his original draft. He connected this expanded sketch to a satiric essay, and together these dissimilar components form “A Natural History of the Dead.” In the story, the narrator breaks from his parody to relate the events in the mountains. Though Hemingway joined the two texts, a union that suggests a relationship between them, he made little effort to blend their incongruous styles. Moreover, he did not revert to the opening mode after the episode at the dressing station. The tale concludes the work as a whole, creating tension between the discursive prose that dominates the majority of the text and the compact fiction that supplants it. This division within “A Natural History of the Dead” can be traced to the earliest stages of its composition. Three distinct manuscripts represent the complex origins of the story, the range of dissimilar material that Hemingway combined to devise his peculiar creation; yet the correlation between each initial component and the finished product is unique. For example, he intensified the conflict over the wounded soldier, but the premise remains consistent from the earliest draft to the published text. This stability complements its prominent position, emphasizing its significance. While the scene illustrates themes within the essay, the ambiguity that characterizes the events prevents an exact parallel to the satirist and his opponents. The order in which Hemingway completed the two sections also discourages such a restrictive interpretation. In contrast, the first available sample of the monograph contains few details that appear in subsequent versions, and the frequent sentence-level revisions during all stages of its creation reveal a struggle to refine its tone and purpose. Some of these changes can be attributed to events from Hemingway’s life that influenced the construction of the text and seem to impact the discourse about the dead. As an imaginary construct, however, the narrator is not equivalent with his author. Though they might share certain memories, attitudes, and convictions, the shifts from irony to re- fragmented origins of “a natural history of the dead” 133 flection to hostility stem from the voice Hemingway crafted, not from the writer himself. These variations expose a character who feigns an objective posture while the very...