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

Chapter 12: Getting to the Truth Hemingway, Cather, and the Testimony of Two World Wars

202 DANIEL CLAYTON geTTIng To THe TruTH Hemingway, Cather, and the Testimony of Two World Wars Daniel Clayton In January 2006, I read Willa Cather’s One of Ours for the first time in an interdisciplinary course I co-taught that semester with colleague Daryl Palmer of our English department. As we worked through the novel with our students, Daryl asked me to comment on the authenticity of Willa Cather’s rendering of war experience. The authority I brought to the matter of judging the truthfulness of Cather’s tale of war derived not only from the fact that, as a historian, I had taught courses on the world wars for close to forty years, but also from my study of the hundreds of hours of video-recorded testimonies of war veterans we had collected in the archive of the Regis University Center for the Study of War Experience. I loved One of Ours and proceeded with enthusiasm to point out the many places in the book where, in my mind at least, Cather had really captured the mood and spirit of men going to war and men fighting in war. But Ernest Hemingway didn’t think so. The students also read the letter Hemingway wrote to Edmund Wilson on November 25, 1923, upon hearing that One of Ours had won the Pulitzer. In the letter, Hemingway disdained Cather’s achievement and dismissed her credentials to write about war; she was a woman, after all. Hemingway’s offensive language recalled the night of October 17, 1995, when Paul Fussell, eminent professor of prosody at the University of Pennsylvania and a Guggenheim Fellow, delivered the keynote address 202 GETTING TO THE TRUTH 203 at Regis’s inaugural Stories from Wartime program and deeply insulted the seventy-six-year-old war widow, Bernie Langfield, who was in the audience. This public speakers’ series ran for twelve consecutive weeks and brought to campus men and women veterans of World War II, who bore witness to their experience in panel discussions and individual presentations. I had invited Fussell to speak because he was a decorated World War II veteran, who had authored two of the best books ever written about war: The Great War and Modern Memory, his seminal study of World War I for which he received both the National Book Award and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa, and Wartime, Fussell’s acclaimed analysis of behavior in World War II. Fussell used the occasion to read from the angry memoir, Doing Battle, that he was writing about his combat experience in World War II. In his talk, Fussell made it clear that he would have nothing to do with all the romantic twaddle about the “Good War,” the popular myth surrounding World War II that had solidified its hold on the American imagination in the hoopla attendant to the various anniversary commemorations of some of the war’s key events. The Ambrose books, published in rapid succession from 1995 on, venerated the veterans’ war experiences and made the GIs hometown heroes all over again. In Citizen Soldiers, Steven Ambrose told us that the GIs were “the children of democracy and they did more to help spread democracy around the world than any generation in history. At the core they knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn’t want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed. So they fought and won, and we all of us, living and yet to be born, must be profoundly grateful” (Ambrose 473). Tom Brokaw anointed them “The Greatest Generation.” In 1999, the films Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line remembered World War II to critical and popular acclaim; both were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar that year. Columnist Bob Greene’s best-selling book of war remembrances, published in 2001, is an exemplar of World War II nostalgically perceived. In Once Upon a Town, Greene set out to find the “Best America there ever was,” and discovered it in “The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen,” in North Platte, Nebraska, during World War II (Greene 4, 8). In the response to the attacks on September 11, the image of the triumphant World War II GI, standing stoically atop the precipice, became the iconic symbol of American unity, patriotism, and resolve. Fussell loathed the idea of the “Good War” because he feared “the 204 DANIEL...