Hemingway’s rather vicious satire of Humanist literary critics is actually a counterattack, a response to reviews of A Farewell to Arms published in The Bookman, a Humanist magazine edited by Seward Collins. The most offensive of these reviews, Robert Herrick’s “What Is Dirt?,” roundly applauded the Boston Watch and Ward Society’s decision to ban A Farewell to Arms21 and deemed its love passages no more significant “than what goes on in a brothel, hardly more than the copulation of animals.”22 A Bookman editorial by Collins deplored the “extreme license” permitted to war books and, in particular, bemoaned the strong language Hemingway used to describe the retreat from Caporetto.23 Such language, Collins effetely reminded readers, “isn’t realism, it’s paprika.”24
Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, the founders of the “New Humanism,” belonged to Hemingway’s parents’ generation.25 Robert Herrick, when he calls A Farewell to Arms “mere garbage,” and Seward Collins, when he calls the novel “disgusting,” speak from prewar literary values not far divorced from Dr. and Mrs. Hemingway’s moral values.26 Clarence Hemingway declared that he would not tolerate “such filth” as in our time in his home and that he “would rather see Ernest dead than writing about such seamy subjects,” while Grace Hemingway wrote her son that The Sun Also Rises was one of “the filthiest books of the year.”27 Promulgated briefly in the 1920s by men approaching their sixties, literary Humanism, like Hemingway’s parents’ outrage, was in part the reaction of an older generation whose most deeply held assumptions were being challenged by a new generation. It was the reaction of the last Victorians to the Lost Generation, defined by Gertrude Stein as “all of you young people who served in the war” (MF, 29).
That same war, which permanently severed young Hemingway from his parents’ religious values, also severed him from the values of literary Humanism. While Humanism admitted that “all human activities are the rightful property of the creative artist from the lowest to the highest,” it also insisted that the artist “endow them with some larger significance, a meaning,” “something of larger import than the facts themselves.”28 In A Farewell to Arms, that target of passionate Humanist attack, Hemingway had tacitly declared that World War I had made “Humanistic” art obsolete. While literary Humanists still mentally resided in the prewar world where, according to Paul Fussell, “everyone knew what Glory was and what Honor meant,”29 the war had taught Hemingway that “the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing were done with the meat except to bury it” (FTA, 185). He set out to replace the “New Humanism” with a new literary naturalism dealing exclusively in “the facts themselves,” never attempting to diminish their inherent significance by assigning them abstract meaning.
For Hemingway true obscenity resided not in graphic descriptions of sex or death, but in attempts to deny with comfortable abstractions the harsh realities of mechanized slaughter. “A Natural History of the Dead” is both a defense and a demonstration of one well-known sentence from A Farewell to Arms: “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments, and the dates” (FTA, 185). In the short story’s satirical section, Hemingway sets up a pseudoscientific experiment to prove his point to those Humanist critics who upheld the novel’s suppression. Borrowing from early naturalists, he places such abstract words as “faith, love, and hope” beside concrete nouns denoting places (Smyrna, Milan, Pocol, Caporetto, Udine), roads (mountain roads, poplar-shaded roads), regiments (Bavarian Alpenkorps), and dates (June 1918) (DIA, 134–40). Going to the heart of the conflict between literary Humanism and his own naturalism, Hemingway juxtaposes Victorian abstractions about “those formed in His own image” against concretions describing the dead: “the heat, the flies, the indicative positions of the bodies in the grass” (DIA, 138).
Twice in the opening satire of “A Natural History of the Dead” Hemingway demonstrates the obscenity of abstraction by using rather clichéd figurative language to describe the dead and then interpreting his own figures literally. One might call these “exploding figures,” designed by the author to self-destruct and reveal their deviation not only from the standard significance of words, but also from reality itself. The technique contributes to the black comedy in “A Natural History of the Dead”:
Figure: “The numbers of broken-legged mules and horses drowning in the shallow water called for a Goya to depict them.”
Explosion: “Although, speaking literally, one can hardly say that they called for a Goya since there has only been one Goya, long dead, and it is extremely doubtful if these animals, were they able to call, would call for pictorial representation of their plight but, more likely, would, if they were articulate, call for someone to alleviate their condition.” (DIA, 135)
Figure: “. . . this general died in a trench dug in the snow, high in the mountains, wearing an Alpini hat with an eagle feather in it and a hole in front you couldn’t put your little finger in and a hole in back you could put your fist in . . .”
Explosion: “if it were a small fist and you wanted to put it there.” (DIA, 140)30
Far more graphic, and hence far more obscene by Humanist standards, than A Farewell to Arms, “A Natural History of the Dead” makes deliberate use of shock tactics like “exploding figures” to convert readers to literary naturalism. Robert Coates might be referring to “A Natural History of the Dead” when, in a favorable review of Death in the Afternoon, he observes that “death in wartime . . . still preoccupies [Hemingway], and he cannot find words strong enough in his determination to make you, too, feel the horror of it.”13 Indeed, Hemingway defended both his use of obscenity and “A Natural History of the Dead” in terms that echo Coates’s. Writing to Everett R. Perry, a Los Angeles librarian who had “tactfully asked [Hemingway] what he thought was gained by using certain plain words in Death in the Afternoon,”32 the author explained that he used occasional obscenities “as I used ‘A Natural History of the Dead.’”33 The purpose of obscenity, and by extension of “A Natural History of the Dead,” was “to give calculated and what seems to me necessary shock,” “to make the person reading feel it has happened to them.”34
With its ironic contrasts and graphic descriptions, “A Natural History of the Dead” assaults Humanism’s failure to assign “some larger significance” to the facts of war. The “New Humanism” is irresponsible precisely because its literature is so far removed from these realities. Indeed, Hemingway emphasizes this point by apologizing for mentioning Humanist critics in what purports to be a natural history of the dead and by hinting at how little literary criticism has ever meant to the young men who die in wars: “While it is perhaps legitimate to deal with these self-designated citizens [Humanists] in a natural history of the dead . . . yet it is unfair to the other dead, who were not dead in their youth of choice, who owned no magazines, many of whom had doubtless never even read a review, that one has seen in the hot weather with a half-pint of maggots working where their mouths have been” (DIA, 140).
Hemingway felt that the modern writer’s chief responsibility to those who had died in the war was to accurately depict their condition. As the satirical portion of “A Natural History of the Dead” draws to a close, Hemingway carries his attack from natural historians and Humanist critics to authors of escapist war fiction. He cites Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed as an example of inaccurate treatment of war.35 Hemingway explodes Harrison’s glib title with the already cited description of entrance and exit wounds in an unnamed general’s skull and with an account of General Von Behr’s death as he led the Bavarian Alpenkorps into the Udine. “The titles of all such books,” Hemingway observes drily, “should be Generals Usually Die in Bed, if we are to have any accuracy in such things” (DIA, 140).
Here the Old Lady interrupts to inquire “When does the story start?” (DIA, 140). Thus prompted, the author leaves his discussion of accurate war ficti
on for fiction itself, setting out to show, rather than tell, how it should be done.
The story concerns a mortally wounded soldier who, unconscious but still alive, has been left to die in a tomblike cave full of corpses:
In the mountains, too, sometimes, the snow fell on the dead outside the dressing station on the side that was protected by the mountain from any shelling. They carried them into a cave that had been dug into the mountainside before the earth froze. It was in this cave that a man whose head was broken as a flower pot may be broken, although it was all held together by membranes and a skillfully applied bandage now soaked and hardened, with the structure of the brain disturbed by a piece of broken steel in it, lay a day, a night, and a day. (DIA, 141)
According to Hemingway’s taxonomy of the dead developed in the earlier satire, the soldier may be classified with “the dead” who “die like cats, a skull broken in and iron in the brain, they lie alive two days like cats that crawl into the coal bin with a bullet in the brain and will not die until you cut their heads off” (DIA, 138–39).
Yet the fictive portion of “A Natural History of the Dead” does more than merely illustrate Hemingway’s previous assertion that “most men die like animals, not men” (DIA, 139). Instead, its chief concern is the impact of this fact upon the living. The dying man is oblivious, but his presence among the dead disturbs the stretcher-bearers, who want to take him out and place him with the badly wounded, set aside elsewhere to await death. Still more distressed by the dying man’s situation is a wounded lieutenant, who demands that the dressing station’s doctor kill the shattered soldier with an overdose of morphine. A firm and unemotional adherent to the system of triage, the doctor refuses to let the stretcher-bearers waste their effort (“‘If you take him out of there you will just have to put him back in’”) or to squander valuable morphine on an obviously terminal case (“‘Do you think that is the only use I have for morphine? Would you like me to have to operate without morphine?’” [DIA, 141–42]). The stretcher-bearers want to remove the dying soldier from the cave because they don’t like to hear him breathing “‘in there with the dead’” (DIA, 141). The doctor correctly diagnoses this reaction as fear—“‘Are you afraid of him, then?’” (DIA, 141). As a writer, Hemingway strove always to “see exactly what the action was that gave you the emotion.”36 In “A Natural History of the Dead,” the action that frightens the stretcher-bearers is the breathing of a man alive but dying in a cave of corpses. Their fear, however, is not of the dying man himself, but of their own mortality. The sound of his breath in the cave of dead reminds them that they too are alive but must die, are already irrevocably consigned to the tomb. They want the dying man removed from the cave and placed with the badly wounded so they need not confront the equation of living and dead implied by his presence among corpses.
The wounded lieutenant’s identification with the man in the cave is even more extreme than the stretcher-bearers’: “‘I will shoot the poor fellow,’ the artillery officer said. ‘I am a humane man. I will not let him suffer’” (DIA, 142). The lieutenant’s desire to euthanize the dying soldier is irrational. The man is unconscious and cannot suffer. He feels neither the pain of his wound nor the horror of his situation. Instead, it is the lieutenant who is suffering—from the pain of his own wound, but especially from the horror of his own mortality. He has projected that suffering onto the unconscious soldier. The lieutenant’s desire to end the dying man’s wholly imaginary misery by shooting him may represent a suicidal impulse on his own behalf, an impulse not uncommon among shellshock victims and familiar to Hemingway.37 Indeed, the lieutenant’s subsequent hysteria and abortive attempt to shoot the implacable doctor suggest that he is suffering from some form of battle neurosis.
The argument about what to do with the dying soldier escalates. The lieutenant lacks the moral conviction to shoot the man himself, although the doctor dares him to go ahead and “assume the responsibility.” Nevertheless, like Job seeking an explanation for the evil in the universe,38 the lieutenant continues to plague the doctor with questions: “‘Why don’t you care for him then? Why don’t you send him down on the cable railway?’” (DIA, 142). The doctor, like Job’s God, does not answer questions, but poses some of his own, invoking his superior authority: “‘Who are you to ask me questions? Are you my superior officer? Are you in command of this dressing post? Do me the courtesy to answer’” (DIA, 142–43).39
The lieutenant, of course, cannot answer except with an obscene litany of frustration: “‘Fuck yourself. Fuck your mother. Fuck your sister’” (DIA, 142–43). He stands up and walks menacingly toward the doctor, who attempts to quell the lieutenant’s rising hysteria by tossing a saucer of iodine in his face. Enraged, the blinded man fumbles for his pistol and tries to shoot the doctor. In a later portion of Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway wrote that “when a man is in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the God-like attributes, that of giving it” (DIA, 233). In “A Natural History of the Dead” the lieutenant rebels simultaneously against death and the doctor by attempting to kill the latter, who easily overwhelms and disarms him, ordering the hysterical officer forcibly restrained so that his eyes can be rinsed and his wound treated.
At this juncture the man in the cave vindicates the doctor and justifies his presence among the dead by dying. “‘See, my poor lieutenant?’” says the doctor. “‘We dispute about nothing. In time of war we dispute about nothing’” (DIA, 144). The doctor’s statement is triply ironic. He and the lieutenant have been arguing about nothing—a moot point of no practical importance—and nothing—the terrifying emptiness of death. The lieutenant cannot “see” anything—the doctor has blinded him with iodine—but the lieutenant can see “nothing,” and that vision of emptiness causes him to scream—“‘Ayee! Ayee!’”—in mental and physical anguish.
The concluding story of “A Natural History of the Dead” can be read as an artist fable, a fable that dramatizes the artist’s responsibility to use “calculated and . . . necessary shock” to make the reader experience the horror of death. Like the ideal artist of the opening satire, the doctor is a man hardened by painful sights. His eyes, red and swollen with tear gas, suggest that fact. He is not afraid to look at death; he carries a flashlight into the cave to examine the soldier dying among corpses. The doctor cannot alleviate the soldier’s condition, but he can depict it. His visit with the flashlight not only would make “a good etching for Goya,” but also illuminates the contents of the sepulcher-cave for the doctor’s audience of stretcher-bearers.40
However, the wounded lieutenant is afraid to confront death so squarely. Although he proclaims himself “a humane man,” his self-proclaimed humanitarianism, like that of the satire’s Humanist critics, is compounded of inexperience and cowardice. He has not seen the dying man, but nevertheless wants the doctor-artist to censor death’s reality for him by killing or removing the unconscious soldier. Terrified rather than hardened by painful sights, the lieutenant has no claim to any experience that would allow him to criticize the doctor. Rather, the lieutenant may have counterfeited experience in order to avoid it—the doctor likens him to the many men who have rubbed onions in their eyes to simulate the effects of tear gas and obtain removal from the front line. When the doctor-artist tosses iodine in the lieutenant-critic’s face, he has not merely administered a shock to quell his hysteria, but has forcibly imbued his frightened and hostile audience with his own vision. Finally, the doctor has given his red and swollen eyes to the lieutenant, has blinded him with iodine, and taught him to see nothing.
The concluding fiction dramatizes the opening satire’s assertion that no one can assign “some larger significance, a meaning . . . something of larger import than the facts themselves” to the experience of death.41 The war and the doctor have forced the wounded lieutenant to confront the absence of “something else” for the first time. “A Natural History of the Dead” climaxes at the moment when the lieutenant recognizes th
e nothingness beyond life and concludes as, unable to cope with his new knowledge, he begins to scream and must be forcibly restrained. Fulfilling Hemingway’s insistence that literature must depict war with unflinching realism, the final story of “A Natural History of the Dead” treats war’s psychological disasters as graphically as the satirical essay treats war’s physical refuse.
The doctor speaks the final published words of “A Natural History of the Dead”: “‘Hold him tight. He is in much pain. Hold him very tight’” (DIA, 144). The lines reflect the doctor’s understanding of the lieutenant’s physical and psychic injuries and include the doctor among Hemingway’s “code heroes,” men who, in Arthur Waldhorn’s words, “[know] what the [lieutenant] must learn, that holding tight is almost all a man can salvage.”42
The discarded coda to “A Natural History of the Dead” commences immediately after the doctor’s final speech and is important for several reasons. It illuminates the published version by extending and even expounding on its imagery. It provides an additional ending to the work. It exemplifies the type of material Hemingway chose to omit from his writing, and it contains an undoubtedly autobiographical vignette about his experiences with Austrian war dead on the lower Piave. Portions of the discarded coda are here reproduced in print for the first time and provide a glimpse of “the underwater part” of “A Natural History of the Dead”:43
Aside from the uniformity of their sex, the seeming unwillingness of many of them to die, even though unconscious and fatally wounded and the consequent nervous effect on the surviving members of their species, which is of course the point of the just related anecdote, another aspect of the dead, in a way related to the matter of their progressive changes in appearance, was the fact that the dead rarely retained any precious or semi-precious metals in their composition.
New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Page 12