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

Chapter 9: A Way It Never Was Propaganda and Shell Shock in “Soldier’s Home” and “A Way You’ll Never Be”

150 celia m. kingsbury a WaY IT neVer Was Propaganda and Shell Shock in “Soldier’s Home” and “A Way You’ll Never Be” Celia M. Kingsbury In his biography of Hemingway, The Writer As Artist, Carlos Baker titles his third chapter “The Way It Was.” According to Baker, “[t]he primary intent of [Hemingway’s] writing, from first to last, was to seize and project for the reader what he often called, ‘the way it was’” (48). But writers as early as Tolstoy, in the murky battle scenes in War and Peace, reveal that in the heat of battle, all is confusion. The way it was depends on a soldier’s perspective; his location on the battlefield, or in the case of World War I, the trench from which he may or may not be going over the top; and the shell that may or may not explode nearby. Adding to the confusion in the case of World War I was the discrepancy between government versions of the war and the literal mud of the trenches. Echoed in films, magazine stories, and advertisements, war propaganda functioned in two ways: first by villainizing Germans, and second, by sanitizing the battlefield. In the war stories, “Soldier’s Home” and “A Way You’ll Never Be,” Hemingway links this discrepancy, a direct result of war propaganda, to the shell shock his characters experience. In these stories, propaganda exacerbates shell shock as it muddles the truth of war experience. Home from the war in the summer of 1919, Harold Krebs of “Soldier’s Home” struggles to define his war experience in a way that does not involve lies, to avoid “the nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration” (112). But World War I was a war in which it 150 A WAY IT NEVER WAS 151 was impossible to distinguish truth from lies. Propaganda defined every aspect of American life, civilian and combatant, and lies inevitably delineate Krebs’s war experience. He must, in his conversations about the war, “stat[e] as facts certain apocryphal incidents familiar to all soldiers” (112). More significantly, Krebs’s grasp on the war is only “real” when he looks at maps. Although Krebs has behaved well during the war, all feelings of accomplishment are “lost” in lies, and he is completely devoid of emotion; he “[doesn’t] love anybody” (116), and he wants to live his life without consequences. Clearly Krebs suffers from shell shock, from the philosophical despair typical of many war veterans. Those apocryphal incidents Krebs lays claim to intensify his shell shock. Lies ignore the way it was for Krebs and thus prevent him from confronting his true feelings about the war. Criticism on these two stories tends, as Robert Paul Lamb argues, to focus either on Hemingway’s near-fatal shrapnel wound, or on his “childhood wound,” that is, his relationship with his mother. Of the leg wound, Scott Donaldson declares that while it had a “lasting effect” on Hemingway, “it hardly provided the only key to unlock his writing and his personality” (126), nor can we assume, as do the childhood wound critics, that Hemingway’s relationship with his parents trumped his near-death experience in Italy. Ronald Smith in “Nick Adams and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” literally diagnoses Nick Adams’s post-traumatic stress disorder, using criteria from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III. Michael Reynolds, in The Young Hemingway, speaks of shell shock, or neurasthenia as it was also called, and speaks of Hemingway’s knowledge of it from his father’s medical journals. Reynolds argues that Hemingway did not believe he had shell shock, “except a little maybe in the night” (47). Reynolds goes on to suggest that when Hemingway invented Nick Adams, he gave Nick the shell shock, and readers can certainly extend that assumption to Harold Krebs. Steven Trout is one of the few cultural critics to examine “Soldier’s Home” in light of, in his words, the “economic, social, and psychological hardships” (6) returning soldiers experienced because of mistreatment by the Veterans’ Bureau, much of it attributed to the corruption of then director Charles Forbes (7). But the kind of mistreatment veterans experienced upon returning home, while deplorable, was not necessarily new; this dehumanization grew out of the cynicism of the policies devised 152 celia m. kingsbury during the war to...