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Hemingway and God, one soldier's perspective

One of the nice things about not having the sitemeter up and running is I can blather on about Hemingway and don't have to worry about watching my site stats plummit

Hemingway, a WWI vet, got a kick out of playing matador and other "Extreme" sports, before there was such a thing. Why?

My teacher, text, and presumably conventional wisdom, say this was part of living life to its fullest to Hemmingway. A devout Athiest and a man obsessed with his own mortality, he sought to wring every drop out of life before its end (ironic that when death came, it came at his own hand).

But, just from a few short readings I've done, I'd put a slightly different spin to it. Starting with "Soldier's Home", a short story about a man that returned from the war changed, finding that he no longer fits into the family or society he left behind. Day to day suburban life is too banal, so he slides into an apathetic maliase from which he cannot work up any emotion for anyone, including himself. While Hemmingway leaves open to interpretation exactly what a Soldier's Home is, I would say that, no matter how much he might hate it, a soldier's home is combat; the only thing that feels natural or comfortable is war.

Hemmingway's almost agressive Athiesm also seems to stem from the war. When the soldier's mother begs him to pray, he responds: "I can't". In another story, a character mumbles out the Our Father and a bit of the Hail Mary, substituting "Nada" and "Nothing" for every noun in the prayer: "Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada...Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee..."

I've said before that the aphorism "There's no athiests in a foxhole" is absolutely wrong; in my experience, there isn't much room for God when the shit really hits the fan. Everybody's too worried about what is concretely right in front of him, there isn't time for naval gazing on the nature of the universe. So what is created is an awful perfection of existence: there's no questions, no equivocations. The whole of the universe is you and your friends, the enemy and his friends, and whatever terrain is in the immediate vicinity. The rest of the world, God and Country and the rest, vanishes into the brutal symmetry of kill or be killed.

That, in my opinion, is the Soldier's Home, and is why so many soldiers feel so out of place when they get home. It is not a mentality that is much called for in civilian life, and it necessarily leads to isolation and apathy if the soldier is unable to readjust.

That, I think, is part of what Hemingway was chasing with the bullfights: a return to the simple world of combat, where the pressures of religion and family and carreer are rendered down to their proper state of inconsequentiality, and the world is set aright for a short while until one of the combatants is killed. It is, perhaps, a combat addiction: not a need to kill, obviously, but a need to get back to the perfect world of combat and leave all the seemingly silly complications of regular life behind.

Posted by Francis at March 29, 2006 05:08 AM | TrackBack