The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization (review)

Keith Gandal, professor of English at Northern Illinois University, provides an intriguing and compelling reassessment of three of the "Lost Generation's" most famous works of fiction: Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929). While focusing primarily on these novels, Gandal does not ignore other works of fiction by these authors and others in developing his assessment.

Through a multidisciplinary approach, using literary criticism, biography, and historical sources, Gandal dismisses the long standing and commonly perceived notion that these novels are antiwar, their authors motivated by disillusionment and alienation brought on by the horrors of the Great War. In reality, Hemingway had only a brief exposure to the front lines as a noncombatant and the other two authors never reached the combat zone. What alienated and disillusioned them was not the war but their personal rejection by the U.S. Army's mobilization system. Gandal therefore discards the label of "antiwar novel" or even "post-war novel" in favor of "post mobilization novel," for it is the authors' negative experiences with the mobilization process, not the war itself, that are reflected in the plot, characters, and themes of their novels.

Fitzgerald received a commission and eventually a promotion to first lieutenant in the Infantry, but never left the stateside training camps and by all accounts was a mediocre officer. Faulkner sought a commission in the air corps but was rejected as too small, eventually joining the Canadian air force but never making it to Europe. Hemingway's poor eyesight prevented his becoming a pilot. He did serve as a Red Cross ambulance driver and was hit by shrapnel in Italy while delivering cigarettes and chocolate to the troops, a rather unheroic wound. All three believed that they deserved better.

Adding insult to injury, these Anglo-American authors saw Jewish and ethnic, or "hyphenated," Americans faring better than they did in the mobilization process, often receiving desirable promotions, assignments, and commissions. Here Gandal sheds light on the U.S. Army's relatively benevolent treatment of Jewish and ethnic Americans. The well-known cultural biases in the Army's intelligence tests and the real discrimination against African-Americans bolster the perception of nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment during the war, but in reality the military could not afford to discriminate against immigrants and first-generation Americans who made up a third of the population. While the tests were indeed biased, U.S.-educated ethnic and Jewish soldiers fared as well as their Anglo-American counterparts and received equal consideration in selection for jobs and officer training.

The characters and their words and actions in the novels Gandal examines reflect the authors' negative wartime experiences, or "mobilization wounds." Male Anglo characters find themselves in competition with ethnic Americans (like Gatsby), usually with successful military backgrounds, for the female Anglo characters. The Anglo male characters, who have unsatisfactory or no military experience, generally fail to win over the principal Anglo female character. Nativist and anti-Semitic language is at times explicit in these novels.

By looking at these novels and their authors in historical context and in light of their personal experiences, Gandal provides a radically new and convincing critique. These famous works are not so much antiwar as antimilitary, based on the negative experiences of the authors with the Army's mobilization process. Gandal, citing British writers Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, who unlike the authors in question did experience the harsh realities of war, acknowledges that an antiwar literary genre does exist. Perhaps his next contribution will be an examination of the novels and memoirs of America's lesser tier of post-World War I authors, war veterans such as Hervey Allen, Thomas Boyd, and William March, to determine the extent to which...