Hemingway's wars : public and private battles
(Book)

Contains bibliographical references (pages 225-242) and index.

"This is a study of the ways various kinds of injury and trauma affected Ernest Hemingway's life and writing, from the First World War through his suicide in 1961"---www.amazon.com

In 1940, Hemingway wrote a preface to Gustav Regler's novel about the Spanish Civil War, The Great Crusade. In those remarks, he described the fragility of soldiers in battle, even when they thought they would win. "There is no man alive today who has not cried at a war if he was at it long enough. Sometimes it is after a battle; sometimes it is when someone that you love is killed; sometimes it is from a great injustice to another; sometimes it is at the disbanding of a corps or a unit that has endured and accomplished together and now will never be together again. But all men at war cry sometimes, from Napoleon, the greatest butcher, down." Born July 21, 1899, Hemingway was a boy fascinated with the tragedies that accompanied all wars, and from the start of World War I in the spring of 1914, he was a conscientiously thorough student of the science of war. He then volunteered to go to the Italian front as a Red Cross worker. There Hemingway was severely wounded a few weeks before his nineteenth birthday. He convalesced in Italian hospitals, fell in love with his American nurse, and returned home - to Illinois and Michigan - to recuperate further. Agnes von Kurowsky's "Dear John" letter reached him in Illinois. As he learned to craft his careful and intense stories, Hemingway suffered a series of physical injuries that marred - and shortened - his life. Head injuries from broken skylights, boxing, car crashes, falls, sports injuries, and plane crashes added to the shrapnel and bullet damage from the Great War. Linda Wagner-Martin's inventory of the writer's woundings - both physical and emotional - provides a detailed background for the brilliant American writer's choices in life: Why did he so seldom return home to Oak Park? Why did he often turn on his apparent friends? Why did he spend long weeks deep-sea fishing, as if to avoid the company of his wives and sons? After he was wounded in the First World War, Hemingway was never a proponent of conflict. Despite being involved in battles of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, Hemingway's hatred of the politics of war - and the loss of life war mandated - was a recurring subject for his writing. As he translated his own physical pain into exquisitely detailed accounts of people caught in the throes of anguish, he proved the depth of the haunting his injuries occasioned. -- from dust jacket.