A New Podcast on its Way
A look at some ideas I'll explore in Hemingway's "A Way You'll Never Be" in my next podcast at "Hemingway Word for Word."
As I write the script for the “second season” of my Hemingway podcast, “Hemingway, Word for Word,” I thought I’d give a taste here of what I’m working on. I ended my first season with the last, masterful, two-part story of In Our Time, “Big Two Hearted River” (Episode 9 & Episode 10 ). In that story, Hemingway’s recurring character, Nick Adams, is returned from WWI, traveling alone on a fishing trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where he is working to heal his deeply scarred psyche through deeply focused interactions with the natural world and his own growing understanding of and powerful need for artistic expression.
Hemingway was one of the earliest writers to draw attention to the chaos and complexities of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome—what was in his time simply referred to as being “shell shocked.” In his story “A Soldier’s Home,” also from In Our Time (Episode 8 of my podcast), he also looks to the psychic scarring of war that has left a young man, Krebs, utterly lost upon his return to normative life in the midwestern United States. Years later, Hemingway returned with another Nick Adams story, “A Way You’ll Never Be,” but this time he would provide a glimpse of Nick in the throes of war and almost utterly lost in desperate, emotional turmoil and upheaval.
Hemingway’s style is notably very different in this story. We don’t find many signature “declarative” sentences, nor patterned repetitions, or chiasmuses, (listen to some early episodes of my podcast for a thorough analysis of these). The story ebbs and flows in a different way, with events and imagery appearing almost randomly at times, like the chaotic, disordered nature of Nick’s own mind (and war itself). This Nick is not working to make art, not attempting to heal, as he so often is in In Our Time. Rather, he is lost in the midst of a mad nightmare.
Having been seriously wounded, and slowly “recovering,” the story finds Nick pedaling a bicycle through a battlefield filled with corpses to a front line post near the spot where he was seriously wounded, Fossalta, Italy. He arrives at the post of his friend and former commanding officer, Captain Paravicini, and it becomes clear from the way other soldiers and Paravicini talk to Nick that there is something noticeably, perhaps even visibly, wrong with him. Nick himself states that “It’s a hell of a nuisance once they’ve had you certified as nutty…No one ever has any confidence in you again,” indicating that his physical wounding has clearly left a deep, psychological impact as well.
In reading the long and meandering and often hard to follow quotation below, notice how different this is from the often-parodied stylistic approach of Hemingway. Notice, too, how this “stream of consciousness,” deeply interior string of memories, serves as an example of just how broken and lost Nick is:
Nick lay on the bunk. He was very disappointed that he felt this way and more disappointed even, that it was so obvious to Captain Paravicini. This was not as large a dugout as the one where the platoon of the class of 1899, just out at the front, got hysterics during the bombardment before the attack, and Para had had him walk them two at a time outside to show them nothing would happen, he wearing his own chin strap tight across his mouth to keep his lips quiet. Knowing they could not hold it when they took it. Knowing it was all a bloody balls—if he can’t stop crying, break his nose to give him something else to think about. I’d shoot one but it’s too late now. They’d all be worse. Break his nose. They’ve put it back to five-twenty. We’ve only got four minutes more. Break that other silly bugger’s nose and kick his silly ass out of here. Do you think they’ll go over? If they don’t, shoot two and try to scoop the others out some way. Keep behind them, sergeant. It’s no use to walk ahead and find there’s nothing coming behind you. Bail them out as you go. What a bloody balls. All right. That’s right. Then, looking at the watch, in that quiet tone, that valuable quiet tone, “Savoia.” Making it cold, not time to get it, he couldn’t find his own after the cave-in, one whole end had caved in; it was that started them; making it cold up that slope the only time he hadn’t done it stinking. And after they came back the teleferica house burned, it seemed, and some of the wounded got down four days later and some did not get down, but we went up and we went back and we came down—we always came down. And there was Gaby Delys, oddly enough, with feathers on; you called me baby doll a year ago tadada with feathers on, with feathers off, the great Gaby, and my name’s Harry Pilcer, too, we used to step out of the far side of taxis when it got steep going up the hill and he could see that hill every night when he dreamed with Sacré Cour, blown white, like a soap bubble. Sometimes his girl was there and sometimes she was with some one else and he could not understand that, but those were the nights the river ran so much wider and stiller than it should and outside of Fossalta there was a low house painted yellow with willows all around it and a low stable and there was a canal, and he had been there a thousand times and never seen it, but there it was every night as plain as the hill, only it frightened him. That house meant more than anything and every night he had it. That was what he needed but it frightened him especially when the boat lay there quietly in the willows on the canal, but the banks weren’t like this river. It was all lower, as it was at Portogrande, where they had seen them come wallowing across the flooded ground holding the rifles high until they fell with them in the water. Who ordered that one? If it didn’t get so damned mixed up he could follow it all right. That was why he noticed everything in such detail to keep it all straight so he would know just where he was, but suddenly it confused without reason as now, he lying in a bunk at battalion headquarters, with Para commanding a battalion and he in a bloody American uniform. He sat up and looked around; they all watching him. Para was gone out. He lay down again.
While there is a lot to unpack here—and much of it will only really be approachable after reading it in the context of the entire story, I want to point out a few things that fascinate me about the passage. I quoted all of it because I think it’s important to follow the entire arc of Nick’s “episode,” starting and ending with the awareness of being in a bunk in “Para’s” tent near the front at Fossalta. For the first part of the quotation, we can nearly follow the memory of being in a bunker, an attack about to occur, then the attack beginning, Paravacini perhaps instructing him on how to get the terrified soldiers to do as ordered, Nick himself keeping his helmet’s chin strap tight to cover up his own trembling/fear. The memory begins to unravel further with “looking at the watch, in that quiet tone, that valuable quiet tone, ‘Savoia.’” Without noting whether this is Paravacini or not, we begin to see Nick becoming still more lost in the memory, not needing to indicate for himself who is who. That word, “Savoia,” was a commonly used battle cry for Italian soldiers during WWI, referring to the Terza Savoy, a famous regimen who fought for the royal, Savoy family. That it is said in a “valuable, quiet tone,” and not as the more common battle cry of a charging cavalry, “Avanti Savoia!” suggests an ironic take on the whole affair—a wizened soldier on the ground’s increasing cynicism with the insanity of war itself, this all, perhaps, a contributing factor to Nick’s own vacillating sanity, and to PTSD in general, where soldiers are asked to behave in ways contradictory to all the moral and social norms of human existence.
The episode spins from the trenches of battle to a Parisian scene, the famous dancers/performers, Gaby Delys and Harry Picler, even appearing momentarily along with perhaps a snippet from one of their performances, that “tadadada.” Nick shifts to recalling how he dreams of the Sacre Couer, Paris’s Sacred Heart cathedral and its striking appearance, “blown white like a bubble,” and then that thought of dreaming brings him toward other, darker, more inexplicable and disturbing dreams, ultimately landing back in war time, to the sight of his wounding in Fossalta, where he has now returned, and the oddly terrifying, simple image of a yellow house there. He thinks, “That house meant more than anything and every night he had it. That was what he needed but it frightened him especially when the boat lay there quietly in the willows on the canal….” Amidst memories of soldiers carrying rifles above their heads and “falling” into the water (being shot and killed), and dashing up a hill feeling “colder” still from his helmet? —death all around him, it is this rather mundane and “quiet” image that haunts him (and it returns throughout the story to haunt him, though Hemingway never provides a clear explanation of what the yellow house was or why Nick found it to be so terrifying).
One can postulate that it may have been the place wounded soldiers were brought for immediate triage, but for me I have slowly come to a different view. The ordinary, quiet of the house and the still, deep-flowing nearby river and the boat anchored there seem to speak to the odd juxtapositions in war of objects from peaceful human society and natural beauty with the chaos and madness and horrors of war.
War itself is like Nick’s very mind that quickly becomes “confused without reason.” The seeming peacefulness of that bright-colored house, the color of the sun, alongside the lovely river, both alongside the imminent death of gun fire and shelling and destruction also are surely “confused without reason.”
In Nick’s chaotic, spiraling string of memories, we also find these two forces—the joyful partying of pre-war Paris with its beautiful Sacre Cour, including memories of even two of its most famous performers, times of “having a girl,” of worrying about how to best “step out of taxis” have been replaced with needing to be “stinking” (drunk) just to get yourself out of the trenches, blindly rushing forward into a blitz of gunfire….
There is so very much to be said about the story, and I’m working on piecing it all together for my next podcast episode, but at the end, as is so often the case when I read him carefully, (ignoring so much of the “code hero,” Ernie-the-macho-man criticism that has plagued him), I’m left with a deeper understanding of why it is that war can scar so deeply and how vulnerable the human psyche is when forced to exist within the confines of its darkness. I find no tough guys in this story. I don’t see Nick yearning to be more masculine, more heroic. I only see a young man utterly terrified and torn to pieces by the tragedy and madness of war.
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