That Richard is likened to a deer must have had overtones of an earlier time in the eleventh century. According to the Celtic religion, the deer was a divine messenger. And then there are the wounds themselves, similar to the wounds of any soldier, which seem to manifest what has always been so, as if in warfare an inner condition had moved to the surface, even through mutilation making a man seem more whole.
March
I was very ill that day but somehow managed to go out to see the pictures made of flowers by the village women adorning all the paths, celebrating the resurrection of Christ. They do this every year at Easter.
To his friends and family Hemingway boasted of plans to enlist as a Marine or an aviator. But he knew this was impossible: his eyes were bad. He could stay in the National Guard, but the likelihood of being called up before the war’s end was small. Then, in February of the next year, representatives of the Italian Red Cross appeared in Kansas City to recruit ambulance drivers.
March
One image in particular struck me, an image of a whip supposed to have been used to flagellate Christ, pincers, and a ball and chain, carried out in petals of spring blossoms.
On June 2, 1918, Hemingway arrived in Paris with one week to spend before he would be dispatched to Milan for his assignment. According to a letter he wrote, on the first day of his leave he was picked up on the street by a woman who took him to a mansion near the outskirts of the city where, he said, using the chaste language of his upbringing, a very beautiful thing happened to me. The woman he met that day told him that under no circumstances would she be able to see him again. But he spent the rest of his stay in Paris looking for her. At the end of his leave, he finally found her as, along with many other soldiers, he watched through a slit in a wall while she made love to a man dressed as a military officer. Was this story, which he wrote in a letter to a friend at home, fact or fiction? This was a theme—an unsuccessful search for a lost woman, a woman lost to him—that would be repeated more than once in his fiction.
March
Reading a book of pre-Islamic Bedouin poetry. The traditional theme describes the loss of a woman, the beloved, followed by a quest for her, and ending with the acceptance of a world deprived of her.
If the story is true he would not have been the first young soldier initiated at one and the same time into the mysteries of sex and violence. Yet if the story were exaggerated, this embellishment would also be part of an old tradition by which stories of military and sexual conquest are both aggrandized. But he was soon to have another intimate contact with the female body. At the end of his week in Paris, he boarded a train for Milan where just after his arrival an official of the Red Cross called him to a munitions plant which had exploded just outside the city. There were many dead and he was shocked to find women among the bodies. It was the presence of the long hair, he said.
March
A photograph of the United States ambassador to the UN speaking with an elderly woman in Kuwait. She is wearing a veil. And his face looks like a mask.
But he is also shocked by the presence of short hair among these women. It is strange how such a detail alerts the mind. His mother was a feminist. There is even subtle evidence that for a period she may have been in love with another woman. But short hair, at that time, would have been such an outward sign of deviation from the expected.
March
Joanna and I take a walk together. She is trying to decide whether or not to go to Chernobyl. A descent, like Inanna’s descent. We are both concerned about her health.
From Milan he was dispatched to Section IV at Schio, near Lake Garda, where he drove an ambulance every other day, ferrying the wounded from the battlefront to an emergency care station. But he was disappointed. He found the work dull. There was nothing to do but look at the scenery, he said. He wanted to see action. He wrote a letter to a girlfriend at home implying he was closer to the battle and under heavy fire. Was this the first lie he was to tell about his experience in the war?
March
In the Times an article saying it will take two years to put out the burning oil wells in Kuwait. The skies are black there.
His hope for seeing action finally came when his commanding officers asked for volunteers to move closer to the line of fire at Fossalta where they were needed to distribute cigarettes, water and chocolate. Everyone volunteered, but Hemingway was among the chosen. Then, after less than a week in Fossalta, on June 7, he learned from the soldiers at the front that heavy shelling was expected soon all along the line.
March
I dream I am back in that house where as a child I was so often frightened. Is this because I am about to visit my mother after so long?
It must have been because of what the soldiers told him that he went out near midnight, carrying his rifle and rucksack over his shoulder, and bicycled to the trenches. He was determined to get closer to the action, and so he advanced to a listening post, one hundred and fifty yards nearer the Austrian lines.
March
Los Angeles. Dinner with Jesse and Rachel. Talk about the war. Rachel is against it. Jesse for it. She is afraid for Israel and sees Hussein as a kind of Hitler.
Does he run over the field? This is after all what he has been waiting for since the war started, ever since he was a small boy in his khaki uniform, to enter battle, to be baptized in this element, to become what he is supposed to become and at the same time to take into himself what has forever been promised him, the fiery center of his sex, himself.
March
I keep thinking about our talk with Jesse. As much as I dislike Hussein’s dictatorship, I do not think he is like Hitler. Still I am troubled by our talk. The implications.
Is it perhaps a certain rapture that he feels now along with his fear as the shells crack and brighten the air and the machine guns rattle? He is as close as he will ever be to the heart of the matter. His blood rushes, the saliva in his mouth goes dry, and if his head is lighter than usual, still every muscle, every nerve seems vital in a new way, as if he had been reborn into this moment.
March
How can one be a pacifist in the face of such evil?
Later, much later, when Hemingway writes a version of this story, the first sensation he describes himself feeling is the wetness of blood filling his boots. A shell had exploded. The soldier in front of him was dead. And another, with both legs blown off, also dead. But a third, near him, with a wound in his chest, was still alive.
March
And yet I can no longer accept violence as a solution. It is a feeling I have in my body, as if in the cells themselves.
It is here that the narrative breaks down. We know he was wounded by shrapnel in over two hundred places in his leg. But did he, despite these wounds, rise to lift the body of the other wounded man? And was he then struck by two machine gun bullets which wounded him again in the knee and the foot? The truth cannot be determined. Evidence exists that, as is so often the case with heroic deeds, the story strayed from the truth, giving the hero capacities which on closer examination are not only improbable but superhuman. Yet it is perhaps necessary, the enlargement, the careful whisking away of certain details, the flattering light casting one act into an unnatural brilliance, another unseen into the shadows. What goes on in battle is in the end just the raw material for the eventual achievement of glory.
March
At the museum here, as part of an exhibit about the Third Reich’s condemnation of modern art, films of book burnings are shown. Among the books burned, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
So, it is part of the same tradition that the story told by both sides in a conflict is the same, except that the roles of the good and bad, avenger and criminal, savior and oppressor have been reversed. In the Arab version of King Richard’s siege of Acre a different story is told. After seizing the city’s ramparts, not wishing to be burdened with prisoners, Richard ordered that 2,700 Arab soldiers together with 300 women and children be assembled before the ci
ty wall. There they were roped together and delivered to the Frankish soldiers who attacked them with lances, sabers and stones until all the wails were stilled.
March
Seeing my mother today. It has been a long time and she is so much more ill.
What was it like for Hemingway to be wounded as he was? The rapture before the shell broke was one matter but this was another. The body near him irrevocably altered, legs blasted to nothingness, not neatly torn but ragged, blood smeared everywhere, mixed with the mud. Later the images will make him shudder.
March
Attached by a thin plastic tube to a machine that increases her oxygen, she is worn out easily by conversation.
I remember David Lueck telling me what he had witnessed in Korea. His voice so low it could hardly be heard in the recording I made, he spoke in the way I have heard women speak of rape or abuse, as if in the very telling something monstrously ugly is brought into being. The terror and brutality seemed to brand him, making him in his own mind irredeemably inseparable from the ugliness. Yet what he saw defied description. It was told more in the difficulty of telling than in the telling itself. He could name the mutilations, intestines falling out of the body, along with shit, blood, pus, but no one who had not been there could have any idea. It was only over time I began to grasp what he was saying to me. It was not just the physical fear he was feeling, it was the weight of something sordid.
March
I am grateful for this time with my mother. I was deprived of my father’s death. It was so violent, so sudden.
How much more important then it becomes to reassemble the fragments of these memories into something better, something fine, something that restores the shaken center into glory.
March
I can see now how crucial to a life the ending is. Death the last part of the story.
A few years after the war, when he has moved to Paris and begun his first brilliant short stories, Hemingway will draw a portrait of a young veteran who makes up stories about the war. Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice, he, too, had a reaction against the war and talking about it. This could easily have been a self-portrait. His story to Chink Dorman-Smith, a soldier he met in a bar in Milan, and later his friend, that he had been wounded leading Arditi shock troopers on Monte Grappa. The story to the reporter told just after his ship docked in America that his body bore more scars from shrapnel than any other man who fought with the Allied forces. The story told to Oak Park High School students that he had fought with Arditi shock troops at Fossalta. The claim to the memorial committee of Oak Park that he had fought in three major battles on the Italian front. The story he told in the cafés of Paris, about being buried alive for four days at the front.
March
In wartime, one quick and senseless death after another. So many stories without endings.
Who is it he wishes to impress with his lies? Is it his father, who meets him at the railroad station, the same father whose critical judgments had wounded him so many times? Or his mother, proud of his accomplishments, whom he soon tells after the war,… the mother of a man that has died for his country should be the proudest woman in the world.…
March
How deep the need is, to tell the story, to hear it to the end.
General Douglas MacArthur was among those men who wished to impress his mother with his heroism. It was she who urged him on in his military career, lobbying in Washington during the First World War to have him made a general. And years after his mother’s death when MacArthur hired women to spend the night with him it was not to make love but to stay up all night hearing him tell the stories of his victories.
March
Aftermath of childhood. Aftermath of war. That silence at the end. The action has already occurred. Nothing can be done.
But there is also another story, of the soldier who wants to impress his father, or who cannot. I am thinking of a story I heard about a young man who was called up to do duty in the Israeli Occupied Territories. The violence, the killing, and what he saw as an injustice disturbed him. Finally he broke down. He was discharged and sent to a clinic. His father would not visit him there. This man was so disappointed with his son that afterward he ceased to speak to him at all.
March
That moment at the end of Iphigenia. Aristotle called it recognition. All the frenzy is done. Agamemnon has already killed his daughter, and his armies are sailing toward Troy. How terrible to recognize this.
In a letter to Bill Horne, another veteran, Hemingway wrote of the 6,000,000,000 females and 8,000,000,000,000 males crying out for secondhand thrills to be got from the front. The storyteller is never far from his audience. He can feel from his listeners what they want to hear. And what they want to hear has also been a part of him. It has been what he himself wanted to believe. It was even a kind of reason for being. The myth around which he organized what he called himself. It was a story he himself had heard not so much from any one person but in the atmosphere, indistinguishable from the medium in which one day he came to consciousness, learned to look into a mirror, to see himself and speak finally the syllables of his own name.
April
I do not want to enclose the text in a definitive meaning. As they come to me I write ideas in my journal instead of the text.
There was another story of course but it came unbidden in the middle of the night when he woke from a nightmare believing that he was still on the battlefield, wounded, unable to flee. But it was only his wife, Hadley, who heard this story, when she would wake at night with him and comfort him.
April
The intuition of Cassandra. The feminine realm of thought holds the secrets of our culture, and hence can make startling predictions.
But the true story had even larger dimensions than this nightmare that frightened him at night. Reality lay under the cover of a denser pattern of lies that had invaded every aspect of his life. Concealing whoever he was was a man he had invented, who claimed to have given boxing lessons, or contracted venereal disease, or traveled all over Spain with a cuadrilla of bullfighters. Trying to reconstruct the bare facts of his life, one discovers only a confusing landscape full of shrouding mists and quagmires. There is no solid ground.
April
Cassandra condemned by Apollo, the reasonable god, to be unheard because she would not yield to his sexual assault. The second assault: what one sees, erased.
Perhaps this is why he hung on to everything, not only manuscripts and letters as most writers do, but even boxing tickets, notes written on the backs of old letters, to-do lists. Could it be that, having surrounded himself with lies, he needed hard evidence of his actual existence?
April
Shirley visiting again from Israel. We have lunch. I make some comment about the cost of Patriot missiles being so high. She says she found out, facing the threat of Scud attacks, that for her survival comes first.
I can imagine Hemingway sitting surrounded as he is by all these papers that document his existence, as he begins to locate something of himself closer to the center. Does he discover this by accident or from the atmosphere of his exile? Perhaps he is writing with his ear, trying to get the words, the voice, the rhythms of the sentences to hold that electric quality of recognition he has heard all around him. He ventures then just over the line of expectation. I knew that I was hit. He is breaking a mold and leaned over and put my hand on my knee. Disturbing convention. My knee wasn’t there. Moving nearer to the truth than any of the tales he has told before. What emerges is a different picture. I wiped my hand on my shirt and, not what he longed for as a small boy telling tales, another floating light came very slowly down, but somehow more alive, vibrant and I looked at my leg and was very afraid. Indefinably vivid, sharp with wit, and clarity, making him feel as he once wrote, cool and clear inside himself.
April
She was grateful for the Patriots. Her son-in-law and children came from Te
l Aviv to live with them. “I tried to keep a diary,” she said, “but family life took over.”
It is not so much that the facts are unchanged. This is fiction. Names are invented, settings shifted. He has to reconstruct through research the famous retreat of the Italian army he describes so well. But he is telling another more crucial truth. How the war was not heroic. How there was fear and failure, and a flatness at the end, a sickness of heart because the things that were glorious had no glory … and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago.
April
I understand this so well. Pushed to the point of survival, the mind closes down and imagination ceases.
I had seen nothing sacred, Hemingway writes, and the atmosphere of Left Bank Paris mirrors his words. All around him a debacle proceeds. It is not only the numbers of men mutilated from the war who can be seen in the streets, the severed limbs, missing eyes, jaws crushed, part of a nose or cheek blown away. There is also La Révolution Surréaliste proclaiming, We shall triumph over everything. And first of all we will destroy this civilization … in which you are caught like fossils in shale. Syntax and consciousness split open, revealing as in a ruptured body the inner workings before found grotesque or obscene. André Breton and Paul Éluard mount an attack on the immaculate conception. Everything that has been so many times undone is coming apart once more. Nightmares and dreams once in the background are thrust into the public discourse. An artist trying to draw the shattered countryside of the battlefields tears his drawing to pieces in frustration. Then, looking at what he has discarded on the floor, he realizes this is the image he wants: fragments of what has been destroyed are reassembled to make a collage. The familiar objects of domestic life—bottle, guitar, plate set by an open window—fracture in a torn and unbalanced geometry. Nijinsky leaping into the air points his toes inward rather than out. How can one bother about the beauty of roses when one has seen what one has seen? Art itself is under suspicion. Perhaps there should be no more painters. No more writers. No more. No more nothing. NOTHING. NOTHING. NADA.
A Chorus of Stones Page 33