Hemingway in Paris Years

HEMINGWAY: THE PARIS YEARS

I finish skimming Hemingway: The Paris Years (1989), and there are some interesting lines that are worth noting:

Ernest, his wound, WW1, trauma (56)

• Fossalta, the place of his wounding, the dark landscape he walked so often in his dreams… [Now] the trenches were gone, and the scarred terrain returned to smooth green slopes. With nothing looking as it had, Ernest could not be certain of his wounding’s location. A rusted fragment from what might have been a gas shell was all the remained of his night journey into death’s domain. Rebuilt, Fossalta lacked the war dignity of its ravagement, bore no resemblance to the dark place he went in his dreams. Back in Paris he wrote:

Don’t go back to visit the old front. If you have pictures in your head of something that happened in the night…do not try and go back to verify them. It is no good. The front is as different from the way it used to be as your highly respectable shin, with a  thin, white scar on it now, is from the leg that you sat and twisted a tourniquet around while the blood soaked your puttee and trickled into your boot, so that when you got up you limped with a “squidege” on our way to the dressing station…don’t go back to your own front…It’s like going into the empty gloom of a theater where the the charwomen are scrubbing.
Courage was one thing, fear another. They were separate, and no amount of courage could protect him from the fear if it were strong enough.

• p. 311: Without Hadley beside him, the old problem of night fears and bad dreams returned…”It certainly is funny how your head, I mean my head, can go most of the time like a frozen cabbage and then it can give you hell when it starts going. Have been so pleased to find it still functions.”

Hemingway & childbirth  (77)

• Hemingway grew up with an unusual awareness of woman’s painful and bloody birthing process…His mother, Grace, continued bearing children until she was forty-three and he was fifteen…all his early life Ernest lived in the presence of pregnant women who carried the secret and suffered the pain. That woman birthing on the Andrianople road brought it all back to him, the mystery and the pain. Nowhere in his later fiction would babies ease gently into this world. There would be a baby born dead [in A Farewell to Arms], a Caesarean baby [in “Indian Camp”], an unwanted baby [in “Hills like White Elephant”], an aborted baby.

Hemingway, Jake Barnes, the Lost Generation (309)

• Jake was a fictional ego, a man who lived without complications – no wife, no kid, no car – a passive laconic man to whom things happened…The more Ernest found out about Jake, the better he liked him, and each day he was living in the book as he had with Nick [another character he created in his short stories] on the river. 

• p. 310: He still did not know how precisely where the story was leading, but that did not matter….This way each day was an adventure into the other country where he could be with Jake, watching him make his way through the Quarter with an ironic detachment. 

• p. 327: This generation that is lost has nothing to do with any Young generation about whose outcome much literary speculation occurred in times past. This is not a question of what kind of mothers will flappers make or where is bobbed hair leading us. This is about something that is already finished. For whatever is going to happen to the generation of which I am a part has already happened….There may be another and better war. But none of it will matter particularly to this generation because to them the things that are given to people to happen have already happened.