The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War by James McGrath Morris (review)

In his postscript to The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and a Friendship Made and Lost in War, James McGrath Morris notes that "we might never have heard of Ernest Hemingway had it not been for an Italian soldier who was killed taking the brunt of the exploding mortar on the July night in 1918. But it seems little or no effort has been made to identify the soldier …" (253). To correct this oversight, Morris publishes here a list of eighteen potential candidates along with a note to contact him if "interested in trying to identify the actual soldier's name" (254). Future readers of this book no longer need to do so, however. As Morris informs in a 18 January 2019 Washington Post article, upon reading The Ambulance Drivers, Italian historian Marino Perissinotto reached out to Morris, and together they concluded that the name previously lost to history must be that of Fedele Temperini, whose regiment was stationed in the same vicinity as Hemingway and whose death was recorded on the same date as Hemingway's wounding. If correct, the discovery of Temperini is remarkable, even if, as Morris goes on to point out in the article, "strict Italian privacy laws prevent us from learning more about him."

Morris's interest in recovering figures from anonymity, especially those obscured due to the overshadowing presence of Hemingway, suggests a parallel of sorts for understanding his account of the friendship between John Dos Passos and Hemingway in The Ambulance Drivers. Morris reminds readers of Dos Passos's importance by quoting George Packer's 2005 comment in The New Yorker: "It's hard now to remember that, several generations ago, the trio of great novelists born around the turn of the century—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner—was a quartet, with the fourth chair occupied by Dos Passos" (249-50). The granters of the The John Dos Passos Award might agree, for they created the prize "to honor one of the greatest—and most often ignored—American writers of the twentieth century." Likewise, Morris's book helps readers remember that Dos Passos not only once occupied that fourth chair but even at times garnered more attention for his writing than the trio that sat beside him.

That said, Morris does not explicitly set out to champion Dos Passos. As the subtitle suggests, The Ambulance Drivers is the biography of a literary friendship, focusing on these writers' careers that developed as a response to The Great War, which inspired them to plot, as Morris puts it, "a literary revolution" (3). Their common experiences as volunteer ambulance drivers in the war significantly informed their plans, even if each writer varied in his view of the catastrophe and how to deal with it in writing. Whereas, according to Morris, "Hemingway had no interest in pondering its causes, worrying about its conduct, or even being bothered by the banality of military life," Dos Passos "wanted to write about war to end it. In Hemingway's mind, war was inevitable and a man was measured by it, as he had been. Literature could capture the experience, not change it" (76). Thus, a portrait emerges of Dos Passos turning to fiction as a medium for social activism and satire while Hemingway appears more consumed with personal concerns. Morris quotes from each writer's work to showcase their distinct versions of Modernism as well: Dos Passos experimented with combining words ("rainseething," "whiskeyglasses," etc.) and splicing fiction with newsreel accounts; Hemingway relied on repetition and minimalism. Morris even shows instances when Hemingway apparently recast ideas originated by Dos Passos. "As in the moment in Dos Passos's Three Soldiers when Chrisfield murders his sergeant," Morris explains (172), Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms includes a scene when Frederic Henry and Bonello execute a sergeant who deserts. Besides chronicling the successes, Morris also presents Dos Passos's struggles as a playwright...