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

Chapter 15: Dangerous Families A Midwestern Exorcism

260 LAWRENCE BROER dangerous FaMIlIes A Midwestern Exorcism Lawrence Broer Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older, they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. —Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray According to his fictional account, Hemingway’s experience with cold and insensitive parents constitutes early demoralizing wounds that never completely heal. The childhood traumas that haunt Nick Adams in such stories as “Indian Camp,” “Ten Indians,” and “Three Shots” engender a lifetime of vulnerability and disillusionment. As Philip Young says, Nick is a “twentieth-century American born, raised, and hurt in the Middle West” (66), who, with each successive appearance, becomes the sum of what has happened to him before, and whose wounds and hopes for recovery are nearly always those of his creator. In arguing the importance of autobiography in the works to follow, I do not assume that Nick Adams is exactly the same person as the author, as if no strategies of authorial distancing were at work to establish the hero as an independent creation (Broer, “Hemingway’s ‘On Writing’”).1 Yet Hemingway clearly used his fiction to summon up deeply repressed childhood experiences that needed to be faced as he faced the traumatic experiences of war in A Farewell to Arms and Across the River and into the 260 DANGEROUS FAMILIES 261 Trees.2 While Hemingway felt threatened by Philip Young’s suppositions that the author had been psychologically crippled by war and the events of early childhood—he claimed that the critic was trying to put him out of business by psychoanalyzing him—Hemingway was not denying the importance of the subconscious in his work, only that Young was invading psychic territory that belonged to him. Asked if he ever had an analyst, Hemingway explained, as researched by A. E. Hotchner, “Sure I have. Portable Corona number three” (139). No doubt an adult Nick Adams speaks for his author in “Fathers and Sons”; he says, “If he wrote it [i.e., his childhood pain] he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them” (371). Hemingway creates Nick Adams precisely as Mark Shechner says Joyce needed to create Stephen Dedalus—“to forge some tenable sense of himself from the brittle and painful fragments of childhood ,” (238) the first phase of a career-long process of fictional cleansing and renewal. The Nick Adams stories portray Nick’s complete evolution from a child to adolescent to soldier, veteran, writer, and parent, someone whose most serious psychological wounds originate in childhood but will require a lifetime to purge.3 When Hemingway speaks of a mother whose “breast milk was never heaven” (Spilka 71) and a father so disappointed with himself that he shot himself, he evokes the adolescent nightmare of family alienation that Michael Reynolds says turned the Hemingway household into a “bloody family battleground” (Complete Short Stories 64). The depressed, unfulfilled father dies worrying about the loss of his family’s modest fortunes, and the mother vanishes into a spiritual void, then into seclusion across the lake from the Hemingway home, possibly into the arms of a female lover.4 Spilka describes Hemingway’s wounded feelings toward his mother as beginning in “passive resentment,” then hardening into permanent adolescent hatred (122). It is easy to see that Nick Adams’s mother and father are the same difficult parents Hemingway associates with death and void throughout his life. At first, the Doctor and Mrs. Adams appear to share equal responsibility for their son’s fears and insecurities, parents who have given up on life as well as each other. Both from Nick and from each other, they seem too emotionally distant for even an occasional hug—self-absorbed, spiritually myopic, and oblivious to one another’s emotional needs. Yet while the absence or coldness of both parents is obvious, Nick feels sure that his 262 LAWRENCE BROER mother is most to blame, a judgment critical to his personal evolution. Nick holds his mother primarily responsible for his family’s history of grief, while the greater sins of Dr. Adams go largely unacknowledged by a son desperate for his love and approval. In either case the non-nurturing mother and the will-less misanthropic father so threaten their son with their own bitterness that even after the war, childhood nightmares so haunt an older but dazed and wary Nick Adams in “Big Two-Hearted River,” that he...