Hemingway in Love and War

...Underneath the second item, Nagel says that "the X-ray of Hemingway's right foot reveals that a machine-gun bullet had fractured his toe...

...In many intellectual circles the myth still circulates that religion is the preserve of the dimwitted and unlettered...

...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990...

...Nor does the new openness to religion signify a hostility to science, but rather an appreciation of the limits of science and technology...

...The question does not admit of a definite answer, but at least it exposes the dynamics that were probably involved in the oddest of the many lies told by a tormented young man in 1918...

...We at the NEW OXFORD REVIEW are spearheading today's intellectual engagement with what Daniel Bell terms "the sacred...

...Toward the end of my conversation with the doctors, the veteran of Vietnam observed that there were statistical reasons for doubting that Hemingway had been hit by both shell fragments and bullets...

...Furthermore, the dramas of sexual confusion that thronged his mind would eventually lead him to write "The Last Good Country," an extraordinarily revealing story which tells of the sexually charged relationship between Nick Adams and his uninhibited kid sister, Littless, who alternates expressions of her wish to be a boy with proposals that she and Nick get married...

...To me, this was an interesting bit of information, inasmuch as one of Hemingway's letters from the Red Cross hospital in Milan, where he was taken after he was wounded, described the bullets that he said had struck him as copper-jacketed, and he also made clear to his father that the bullet in his right knee "went under the knee cap . . . and didn't smash it a bit...

...We are particularly interested in exploring religious commitments that yield humane social consequences, as exemplified by such giants as St...

...Villard confesses that he himself "came to have a real crush on Aggie," but he never asks himself whether envy of a rival was not the source of his fervent conviction that Agnes largely withheld her sexual favors from Hemingway, even as she completely did from him...

...H enry Serrano Villard, Nagel's aged co-editor, begins the book with a memoir...

...Oh, my God...

...The coin-purse bullet, they said, could easily have been picked up by the young Hemingway almost anywhere (on his convalescent visit in October 1918, for example, to the warred-over vicinity of Bassano del Grappa), so that his possession of it said nothingabout his veracity and character...

...The principal impression he conveys of good old Ernie is of an innocent kid of nineteen who impetuously fell in love with a pretty American nurse seven HEMINGWAY IN LOVE AND WAR: THE LOST DIARY OF AGNES VON KUROWSKY, HER LETTERS, AND CORRESPONDENCE OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY Henry Serrano Villard and James Nagel Northeastern University Press/303 pp...

...Their best guess was that it was a piece of mortar-shell casing, for in World War I such casings were often made up of small metal squares...

...About the coin-purse bullet, Nagel writes in the preface to the book that "it matches the object [sic] in the X-rays, a matter of significance not so much for medical reasons as for assessKenneth S. Lynn is the author of Hemingway and other books...

...Rather, there's an awareness that, as Jean Bethke Elshtain put it, religious commitment "can help further social reform," and that religion can supply the ethical bedrock upon which to make political choices which are far more durable than those based on passing ideologies and enthusiasms...

...This exasperatingly unrewarding essay might have acquired significance if Nagel had proceeded to deal with the hints of deeply rooted psycho-sexual malaise that were evident in Hemingway's late adolescence...

...For if he wasn't wounded as badly as he said, then perhaps the battlefield damage to his psyche was neither severe nor enduring, which would mean that the politicized interpretation of him as a victim of history whose novels and stories arose out of disillusionment with a dirty (read capitalistic) war was not the heart of the matter...

...ing Hemingway's veracity and character...

...When I saw that couple on the train yesterday," Agnes wrote to Hemingway on October 16, 1918, "I kept wishing I had you alongside of me, so I could put my head on that nice place—you know—the hollow place for my face—& go to sleep with your arm around me...

...Harvard professor Warner Berthoff led the chorus of voices when he saluted the book in a jacket blurb as a "permanent, irreversible" contribution to "the much disputed biographical record...

...21.95 Kenneth S. Lynn 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 years his senior, Agnes von Kurowsky...

...Please allow 2 to 8 weeks for delivery of first issue) SPECIAL DISCOUNT RATES F ^ One-year subscription $14 (regularly $19) ^ One-year student, unemployed, or retired person's subscription $12 (regularly $16) ^ Two-year subscription $23 (regularly $35) NAME (Please print or type) STREET ADDRESS CITY STATE ZIP CODE OR FIRST-TIME SUBSCRIBERS ^ One-year Canadian or foreign subscription .. . . US$17 (regularly $22) Payment must be drawn in US Dollars ^ Sample copy $3.50 Send coupon or letter...

...His parents' horrified reaction finally compelled him to admit that he had never met Miss Marsh...

...We bat around a wide variety of issues and defy easy pigeonholing...

...Nor does it-imply a retreat from working for peace, justice, or human dignity...

...For attacking troops equipped with machine guns usually move forward into firing positions only after the mortars behind them have ceased their bombardments —lest they themselves be hit...

...Mail to: NEW OXFORD REVIEW Room 746 1069 Kains Ave...

...As to whether the bullet matched the object in Hemingway's right knee, there was no way of knowing, they said...

...The unqualified conclusions that Nagel draws from photographic evidence that is highly inconclusive (to say the least...

...Francis, Gandhi, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Tawney, Schumacher, Mounier, Dor')thy Day, Archbishop Tutu, Lech Walesa, Martin Luther King Jr., and Archbishop Romero...

...The New York Times Magazine article discussed the NEW OXFORD REVIEW as part of this return to religion, and rightly so...

...For pages, Nagel goes on worrying about the extent of their lovemaking...

...Similarly, Agnes's notation in her diary that another of the nurses "found one of my yellow hairpins under Hemingway's pillow" fails to elicit any editorial comment about Hemingway's lifelong fixation on hair, as evidenced for instance in his evocation of the sexual-foreplay games in the IS RELIGION JUST FOR THE IGNORANT...

...Although his father did not utter a word of reproach, Gregory saw on his face "a look of such devastation and horror and, just, yuck...

...BOOK REVIEWS BBeginning with Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley a half century ago, literary critics on the left have always cherished the proposition that Hemingway was traumatized forever on the night of July 8, 1918, when he was struck in the legs at Fossalta di Piave by a one-two punch—or so he claimed—of shrapnel fragments and machine-gun bullets, and they hate the fact that in the past few years the second part of Hemingway's claim has been dismissed by other critics as a fabrication...

...This fascination is largely a result of the failures of secular substitutes for religion (such as rationalism, narcissism, technological utopianism, aestheticism, and extremist political ideologies) to give abidingly satisfying answers to the truly significant puzzles in life: goodness, suffering, love, death, and the meaning of it all...

...The probability is that the Austrian forces at Fossalta were not mixing their modes of fire when Lieutenant Hemingway—and Italian soldiers near him—was felled...

...Only twelve of them—a mere 1.6 percent—were the victims of more than one kind of fire...

...And we probe the literary and philosophical riches offered by such greats as Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Buber, Auden, Eliot, Silone, Maritain, Waugh, Merton, C.S...

...When Agnes was eighty-four, Villard further reports, he had a reunion with her in Florida, and it clearly pleases him to tell us that she recalled her relationship with Hemingway as a "flirtation" that had "never gone beyond that...

...Thus, Nagel does not relate the age discrepancy between Hemingway and Agnes, which caused her to address him as "dear Boy" or "dear bambino," to his racking obsession with his dominating mother, nor does he point out that Hemingway's mother was the same height, five feet eight, as Agnes and that her chestnut hair was the same color as hers...

...To illustrate his point, he referred to the first 750 wounded Americans whom he had treated in Vietnam...

...When he was about twelve, Gregory recalled, his father walked in on him while he was wearing a pair of his mother's nylon stockings...

...The same narrowness of focus characterizes Nagel's treatment of the romantic documents in Hemingway in Love and WarAgnes's diary from June to October 1918, and her letters to Hemingway...

...An obvious clue to the puzzle is The Birth of a Nation, which Hemingway saw while in high school...

...Did Mae Marsh's cinematic performance not only remind Hemingway of his sister Ursula, but project into his consciousness a rudimentary image of Littless, which he found so compelling that it triggered the fantasy that the actress had agreed to become his wife...

...If you're keen on intellectual ferment and the life of the mind and spirit, subscribe today...

...Both doctors were quick to point out the absence of lateral X-rays that would furnish profiles of the embedded objects...

...Lewis, Simone Weil, Flannery O'Connor, and Graham Greene...

...The deformation of the coin-purse bullet did prompt them to add, though, that a fully jacketed bullet traveling at normal velocity would have gone straight through Hemingway's body unless it was impeded by contact with bone...

...The incident suggests something," Nagel dismissively writes, "of Hemingway's naive interest in the subject of romance and his willingness to invent where it did not exist...

...Three photographic items never before published are the centerpieces of Nagel's discussion of the bullet wounds: a frontal X-ray of what appears to be a circular object embedded in Hemingway's right knee, a frontal X-ray of what appears to be a square object embedded in his right foot, and a picture of a deformed bullet found in a World War I coin purse of Hemingway's...

...T ast year, Truman Capote's biographer, Gerald Clarke, published an interview with Hemingway's youngest son, Gregory, in which he asked him about the transvestite urges that have plagued him since early childhood...

...Make check payable to NEW OXFORD REVIEW...

...He summarizes the opinions of earlier scholars (with spectacular inaccuracy, I might add, in the case of my own study of Hemingway) and argues with them and puts them down...

...But of course he doesn't...

...As for the square-shaped object in Hemingway's right foot, both doctors were almost certain, even without a profile shot, that it was not a machine-gun bullet...

...In other words, Nagel has no explanation for the incident and is not interested in developing one...

...Nagel is even unmoved by a truly bizarre lie about love that the teenaged Hemingway told...

...A couple of weeks later, his father said to him, "Gig, we come from a strange tribe, you and I." Hemingway's struggles with his own sexual-identity problems began early and lasted late, and key members of the "tribe" in which his personality was shaped were likewise caught in psychological traps...

...Berkeley, CA 94706 PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1990 33 hospital in Milan between Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms: I would take out the pins [says Frederic] and lay them on the sheet and it would be loose and I would watch her while she kept very still and then take out the last two pins and it would all come down and she would drop her head and we would both be inside of it, and it was the feeling of inside a tent or behind a falls...

...Without that sort of help, they found it impossible to determine whether the round-looking object in Hemingway's right knee was a pellet from a mortar-shell canister or the bottomof a machine-gun bullet...

...Those who write for us — Robert N. Bellah, J.M...

...By adding these details to his initial account of his wounding, Hemingway unwittingly raised further questions about it...

...are a measure of the ruthlessness and rigidity of a hidebound mind...

...Hemingway must have been fascinated to watch her, for he himself was exceedingly close to his beautiful younger sister, Ursula...

...An ecumenical monthly edited by lay Catholics, we've been characterized by George Will as "splendid," by the University of Chicago's Martin E. Marty as "lively," by Berkeley's John T. Noonan Jr...

...It is, therefore, no wonder that defenders of the leftist faith uncritically accepted the alleged proof offered last fall by James Nagel, the co-editor and master organizer of the collection of documents called Hemingway in Love and War, that Hemingway's machine-gun wounds were real...

...From Harvard to Berkeley, and amid inquisitive people generally, there's an undeniable renewal of interest in the questions traditional religion raises and seeks to answer...

...On the question of whether the toe was broken, they saw no displacement in the outline of the bone, but felt unable to make a judgment merely on the basis of a frontal X-ray...

...In the spring of 1918, while waiting in New York City to be sent overseas, he startled his family and various friends by announcing that he had bought a costly engagement ring and that he planned to marry the movie actress Mae Marsh, who had risen to stardom in The Birth of a Nation (1915...

...By no means, however, does this religious renaissance entail embracing the ersatz gods of dog-eat-dog individualism, consumerism, or superpatriotism...

...Other than his concern with the question of how far, physically speaking, Hemingway got with Agnes, Villard evinces no curiosity whatsoever about the nature of the liaison...

...For a sexual politics as well as a wound politics is at work in Hemingway in Love and War...

...Nagel's Hemingway was maimed by a dirty war and by nothing else...

...When he returned from war in 1919, for example, he and the 17-year-old Ursula fell into the habit of sleeping together in the same bed, without the knowledge, apparently, of the rest of the family...

...As an ambulance driver in Italy in 1918, Villard was stricken with hepatitis and ended up in the hospital room in Milan next to Hemingway's...

...Miss Marsh's interpretation of the kid sister of the Confederate colonel, Ben Cameron, is marked by a combination of tomboyish uninhibitedness and a loving intimacy with Ben that almost seems incestuous...

...Underneath the first of these items, Nagel has written that "the X-ray of Heniingway's right knee reveals a machine-gun bullet but no damage to the patella, confirming what he said in a letter to his father...

...Did they or didn't they have intercourse...

...From the genteelly phrased expressions of affection and longing by a well-brought-up young woman born in the Victorian 1890s, how can one possibly tell...

...In the end, he delivers himself of the solemn judgment that the lovers went no further than the petting stage—despite the fact that the evidence in the diary and letters is irremediably ambiguous, thereby reducing to absurdity any sort of definite statement about the stage where they stopped...

...Nouwen, Robert Coles, Christopher Lasch, Walker Percy, and others — express themselves with clarity, verve, style, and heart...

...Cameron, John Lukacs, Henri J.M...

...M y study of the three photos, and of Nagel's assertions about them, has benefited immensely from a consultation with two medical school professors of surgery whose expertise in wound ballistics was respectively honed in the service of the British army in World War II and of the American Army in Vietnam...

...But they are not the only measure...

...Yet, recently The New York Times Magazine carried an article on the "return to religion" among intellectuals...

...as "indispensable," and by Newsweek as "thoughtful and often cheeky...

...None of this background information is brought to bear upon the materials in Hemingway in Love and War...