Hemingway, the Red Cross, and the Great War by Steven Florczyk (review)

This exhaustively researched monograph is clearly written, cogently organized, and sensibly interdisciplinary in its methods. It will garner the interest of scholars interested in America’s role in the Great War as well as Hemingway specialists. Readers with a pointed interest in the literary development of modern letters or those looking for new critical approaches to modern American fiction are likely to find the book of less use for their particular purposes. Professor Florczyk has undertaken an enormous labor of scholarship, producing a monograph with forty-two pages of notes (a number of which attain to the proverbial mini-essays that one finds in the work of specialists) and nine pages of bibliography. He has immersed himself in primary material, especially the archives of ambulance drivers, canteen workers, and Red Cross functionaries, and he also demonstrates a command of pertinent secondary works. If one were to take Hemingway out of the picture, one would still be left with a thoroughly informative book on the American Red Cross during the First World War. One primary source deserves particular mention in this regard: the author has made good use of the apparently extensive private papers of Robert Bates, Red Cross volunteer. Bates’s notations provide a good deal of background information, local color, and detail from which much can be inferred about the typical activities, attitudes, and practices of ambulance drivers in World War I, including, of course, Hemingway himself.

As for the biographical dimension of the study, most of the new findings are contained in the first part of the book, which also serves to verify heretofore uncertain biographical details and to correct or refine contested and ambiguous matters that bear directly on Hemingway’s life, but which are seldom decisive in the criticism of his fiction. The book is laid out in five body chapters, framed by an introduction and conclusion, each of which proceeds chronologically according to Hemingway’s involvement in the war. Of special interest to the Hemingway specialist is Florczyk’s discussion of Hemingway’s wounding, treatment, and convalescence on the Italian front. Also of interest is his discussion of the famous author’s behavior and attitudes upon his return home to Oak Park, Illinois after the war. The examination of war-themed and war-influenced Hemingway stories that comprises the final forty pages or so, while authoritative and clear-headed, actually shows little that could not be shown without the historical and biographical findings that comprise the majority of the study. Nevertheless, the clarity and thoroughness of Florczyk’s synthesis of scholarship on Hemingway’s war fictions render these pages of use, especially to scholars who may be somewhat familiar with Hemingway studies but who are not specialists in modern fiction or Hemingway careerists.

This book is one of a number of recently published monographs on Hemingway put out by Kent State University Press. The volume contains a helpful map of the Italian theater of war along with a generous supply of photographs. It is handsomely put together, a worthy vehicle for an admirable work of scholarship.