Hemingway, Men At War
Posted: June 25, 2023 Filed under: Hemingway, war, writing Leave a comment
once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.
Went looking for the origin of that quote, because it seemed relevant to the current WGA strike.
The “internet of quotes” is a candy-colored jungle, where no one ever bothers to give the source or the context and half the time it’s wrong or on an inappropriate sunset backdrop.
This quote can be found in the Introduction to Men At War, by Ernest Hemingway. Men At War was a literary anthology first published in 1942. Hemingway edited his introduction for the 1955 edition. We find the whole essay reproduced here, and it’s worth a read.
The writers who were established before the war had nearly all sold out to write propaganda during it and most of them never recovered their honesty afterwards. All of their reputations steadily slumped because a writer should be of as great probity and honest as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chase or note, and after on piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.
on some pitiful bravado compared to some solid magnificence:
it was like comparing the Brooklyn Dodger fan who jumps on the field and slugs an umpire with the beautiful professional austerity of Arky Vaughan, the Brooklyn third baseman.
on Tolstoy’s War And Peace:
his ponderous and Messianic thinking was no better than many another evangelical professor of history and I learned from him to distrust my own Thinking with a capital T and to try to write truly, as straightly, as objectively and as humbly as possible.
On cavalry:
A man with a horse is never as alone as a man on foot, for a horse will take you where you cannot make your own legs go. Just as a mechanized force, not by virtue of their armor, but by the fact that they move mechanically, will advance into situations where you could put neither men nor animals; neither get them up there nor hold them there.
on fights:
At that moment it was perfectly clear that we would have to fight them.
When that moment arrives, whether it is in a barroom fight or in a war, the thing to do is to hit your opponent the first punch and hit him as hard as possible.
A couple recommendations I’ve got to check out: a story called “The Wrong Road” by Marquis James and “The Stars in Their Courses” by Lt. Col. John W. Thomason, a chapter in a book called Lone Star Preacher (did Shelby Foote crib that title title for his book on Gettysburg?)
To live properly in war, the individual eliminates all such things as potential danger. Then a thing is only bad when it is bad. It is neither bad before nor after. Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present minute with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire. It, naturally, is the opposite of all those gifts a writer should have. That is what makes good writing by good soldiers such a rare thing and why it is so prized when we have it.
(is that what DFW was trying to say, re athletes not soldiers, in his Tracy Austin review?)
I have seen much war in my lifetime and I hate it profoundly. But there are worse things than war: and all of them come with defeat. The more you hate war, the more you know that once you are forced into it, for whatever reason it may be, you have to win it. You have to win it and get rid of the people that made it and see that, this time, it never comes to us again.
As for Arky:
After leaving the Seals, Vaughan bought a ranch in Eagleville, California, where he retired to fish, hunt and tend cattle. On August 30, 1952, Vaughan was fishing in nearby Lost Lake, with his friend Bill Wimer. According to a witness, Wimer stood up in the boat, causing it to capsize, and both men drowned.
Helytimes 