War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway's Life and Writings.

Mellette, Justin

War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway's Life and Writings. Edited by Steve Paul, Gail Sinclair, and Steven Trout. Kent, OH: Kent UP. 363 pp. Cloth $65.00.

In their introduction to this diverse collection of seventeen illuminating essays on Hemingway's formative experiences--both personal and literary-Steve Paul, Gail Sinclair, and Steven Trout offer the useful reminder that "For Hemingway, war and ink went together from the start" (xi). Indeed while the young Hemingway began his literary apprenticeship in the newsroom--an aspect of his career the editors point out has been largely neglected since Charles Fentons work in the mid-1950s--he honed his craft in part due to his experiences on the battlefield.

Although as the editors note there has been no dearth of scholarly inquiry into Hemingway's early life and writing, War + Ink aims to illuminate new lines of inquiry that will likely bear fruit for current and future generations of Hemingway scholars by reframing and exploring novel avenues of scholarship from a range of methodologies, including historical, biographical, psychoanalytic, and textual. The editors claim the volume "breaks important new ground in four ways": "first, by reframing Hemingway's formative experiences in Kansas City; second, by establishing a fresh set of contexts for his Italian adventure in 1918 and his novels and stories of the 1920s; third, by offering some provocative reflections on Hemingway's fiction and the issue of truth telling in war literature; and fourth, by reexamining Hemingway's later career in terms of themes, issues, or places tied to the writer's early life" (x).

The editors usefully divide the collection's essays into a half dozen categories, arranged in rough chronological order, following Hemingway from his Kansas City apprenticeship to his time in World War I and onward through his blossoming literary career in the 1920s. Special attention is paid to the manifestations of Hemingway's youthful experiences in his work, as in the trio of essays dedicated to "Soldier's Home." The volume concludes by moving into Hemingway's later writing, exploring his tendency to return to themes and issues that were of foundational importance to his early work.

The opening essays in the volume, Steve Paul's "Hemingway in Kansas City: The True Dope on Violence and Creative Sources in a Vile and Lively Place" and John Fenstermaker "Ernest Hemingway, 1917-1918: First Work, First War," offer examinations of Hemingway's reporting; the former essay provides a case study of possible source material for one of the In Our Time vignettes, while the latter stresses the author's early fascination with covering the "illicit and illegal" (15) sides of Kansas City life and his youthful braggadocio as a reporter.

Part two of this collection offers myriad historical contextualizations of Hemingway's experience in World War I. First, Susan Beegel discusses the worldwide flu epidemic of 1918, particularly its impact on Hemingway's relationship with Agnes von Kurowsky and its later role in stories such as "In Another Country." Jennifer Keene makes the provocative argument "that in many respects Ernest Hemingway's military service in World War I was rather typical" (53) in "Hemingway: A Typical Doughboy," based on a deeper, broader understanding of how soldiers' wartime experiences differed significantly from cultural representations of them. The final essay in the section, Ellen Knodt's '"Pleasant, Isn't it?' The Language of Hemingway and His World War I Contemporaries" extends Keene's analysis by arguing that Hemingway's terse, laconic prose can also be found in the letters of fellow soldiers, nurses, and ambulance drivers.

Part three dives more fully into Hemingway's early fiction, opening with Jennifer Haytock's "Looking at Horses: Destructive Spectatorship in The Sun Also Rises" which offers a theoretical consideration of the role of spectatorship--drawn from the work of Martin Harries--and the ways in which Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley intentionally evade direct memories of their respective war experiences. Patrick Quinn and Steven Trout's essay analyzes A Farewell to Arms alongside "what many scholars regard as the novel of Italy and World War I," (114) Emilio Lussu's Sardinian Brigade, concluding that both works are realistic portrayals of the uniqueness of the Italian war experience, and that both are able to capture the "bloodthirsty idealism of many members of the officer class" (114-15). Matthew Forsythe's "The Fragmented Origins of Ernest Hemingway's 'A Natural History of the Dead' is an important compositional history of that neglected story.

Considering its thematic applicability, "Soldier's Home" receives an impressive amount of consideration in the volume, including all three essays in part four. Celia Kingsbury discusses how propaganda serves as a direct factor in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or "shell shock." William Blazek's "All Quiet on the Midwestern Front" offers a provocative reading of the text, one that situates Krebs's alienation as a reaction to his reception by members of his hometown, who, Blazek argues, are "fundamentally disturbed by the native son, who brings back with him martial and sexual experience that poses uncomfortable questions for his family and his community," and thus regard him as "a menace that must either be tamed or excluded" (170-71). Lastly, Daryl Palmer's "Hemingway's 'Soldier's Home': The Kansas Welcome Association, Abbreviations, and World War I Archives" is an extended study of the story's first two sentences, focusing on the ways in which Krebs' college background and fraternity lifestyle provide a vital frame for the story as a whole, particularly the importance that the state of Kansas holds for the narrative. Palmer utilizes primary documents, including college yearbooks, to support his analysis.

Part five provides welcome approaches to Hemingway's war writing, consisting of essays by Daniel Clayton and Thomas Bowie Jr., who team-teach a seminar at Regis University entitled "Stories from Wartime." The course is premised on students bearing witness as veterans share memories of their wartime experiences. Clayton's "Getting to the Truth: Hemingway, Cather, and the Testimony of Two World Wars" provides an introduction to the course with emphasis on Hemingway's claims that experience provided the necessary tools to write about war, an argument drawn in part from his skepticism toward Willa Cather's war writings, as revealed in a 1923 letter to Edmund Wilson. Bowie's "The Need For Narrative In Our Time: Hemingway's 'Tragic Adventure' and Regis University's Stories from Wartime" offers a reading of In Our Time based on the ways in which we remember war, utilizing veteran testimony as a guiding, analytic principle.

The influence of Hemingway's early experiences on his later career receives consideration in the final essays. Mark Cirino's "That Supreme Moment of Complete Knowledge: Hemingway's Theory of the Vision of the Dying" places Hemingway amongst other modernists in his fascination with death, specifically the idea that one's life would flash before his or eyes in their final moments. Cirino considers Hemingway's brushes with death as his framework for discussing works such as "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Lawrence Broer provides an intriguing new glance into Hemingway's relationship with his parents in "Dangerous Families: A Midwestern Exorcism," discussing the ways that the Nick Adams stories reveal not only war-related trauma but also Hemingway's "deeply repressed childhood experiences" (260). Kim Moreland adds an insightful examination of Hemingway's inability to cope with shifting gender roles during wartime in "Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in A Farewell to Arms, The Fifth Column, and For Whom the Bell Tolls," an essay that reaffirms the importance of considering gender in Hemingway's oeuvre.

The final essay of the volume, Matthew Nickel's "Across the Canal and Into Kansas City: Hemingway's Westward Composition of Absolution in Across the River and into the Trees" returns us where we (and Hemingway) started: Kansas City. Nickel examines the novel's religious subtext through a reading of key scenes, particularly Cantwell's imagined road trip west which departs from Kansas City. Nickel ultimately argues that the novel follows the pattern of absolution. By closing with this careful study of Hemingway's later career, War + Ink comes full circle and offers scholars fertile grounds for re-examining the lasting influence Hemingway's youthful experiences, from the newsroom to the battlefield, had on his literary output.

Justin Mellette

The Pennsylvania State University