‘They were seated in the boat, Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.

‘In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.’

These are the final words of Ernest Hemingway’s 1924 short story Indian Camp. To many, this short story, along with other early masterpieces in his collection In Our Time published shortly after he was severely wounded at Fossalta in 1918, embodies his purest and best work. I would say there is a good argument that throughout his life he wrote with supreme quality and richness, but his earlier works give us a good insight into the profundity of that moment in the trenches where his life changed, for better or worse.

As it is no doubt widely known Hemingway was drawn to the bullfights, while contemporary Americans, as well as academics who came later, wondered if the aficionado’s curiosity was stoked by the wounds he suffered years earlier in the harrowing circumstances. The transformative moment that must occur when hit with over 200 shards of fragment in the leg before being knocked over in the mud unconscious, not to mention the white-hot heat of the blast, can hardly be understated.

The Wound of War hypothesis in Edmund Wilson’s 1939 essay Hemingway: Gauge of Morale and his follow-up 1941 book The Wound and the Bow, presents the Greek myth of Philoctetes as the archetypal ‘hero with the incurable wound’, the vessel which carries the notion of there being a delicate correlation between art and suffering. Comparisons can therefore be drawn between the ancient son of King Poeas of Meliboea and the young American born centuries later in Oak Park, Illinois.

Meditating on Wilson’s argument that the ‘conception of superior strength as inseparable from disability’, one cannot help but wonder if A Farewell to Arms, my personal favourite Hemingway novel, would have been published if he hadn’t almost died. The young writer later recalled he felt his soul flutter out of his body after the Austrian trench mortar bomb exploded in the darkness.

‘I died then. I felt my soul or something coming right out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner. It flew around and then came back and went in again and I wasn’t dead anymore.’

Is this the defining moment that gave rise to the literary titan? Had it always been within him as James Hillman’s acorn theory might suggest, like the sickly boy who became the great bullfighter Manolete? Could it be the moment of initiation from innocence to experience?

Throughout Hemingway’s life he sought the company of soldiers and to be in the middle of some great battle or bullfight, or at least on the periphery to study it closely.

To be so heavily affected by life, which I suppose is lazy phraseology, and so I go deeper, to have faced death and lived is something only a few have experienced. Many more of us are wounded in other ways. Such moments may motivate us towards different goals or hinder us from them. For Hemingway, to be blown up in a trench and almost killed in a foreign land, and at such a young age, sparked a lifetime of struggle to get the words right.

Published after his death, A Moveable Feast, a memoir of his time in Paris in the 1920s, beautifully depicts how he would train himself to write ‘one true sentence’ and afterwards the ‘wonderful’ walk down the steps from his writing studio knowing that he had ‘good luck working’. Later, he describes writing a story about coming back from the war with no mention of the war in it. This two-part story would be titled Big Two-Hearted River, published in the collection In Our Time, and serves as a glimpse into the way the young veteran would seek to forget what he had seen and felt on the front through the cathartic release of fishing.

But he would never forget.

As Edna O’Brien explains in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s documentary trilogy Hemingway, the vital component of writing one true sentence is ‘being there’. In a letter to a friend at the Kansas City Star on June 9, 1918, a young Ernest writes:

‘Having a wonderful time!!! Had my baptism of fire my first day here, when an entire munition plant exploded… Oh Boy!!! I’m glad I’m in it. They love us down here in the mountains.’

Are these the words of a young man whose spirit was spoiled by the blast? On the contrary, he strikes the reader as one who revels in the heroism of being wounded by default; and he was subsequently rewarded for his valour.

No, his true wounding came later.

In the hospital in Milan, Hemingway falls in love with his nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, daughter of a Polish count and seven years older than him, and they become engaged. But later, in March of the following year, he received a letter from her, breaking off their engagement. Ernest, heartbroken, wrote a letter to his friend Bill who served alongside him in Italy:

‘I feel all broken about it. Why? Why? Do such things happen… For me there are some things that when they are killed stay dead…’ To which Bill replied, ‘Even though she may pass, the truths that she represented can not… they are forever.’

To be wounded by your lover who nursed you back to health does not just run skin deep. One who has read The Sun Also Rises may recall the emasculating wound of the novel’s protagonist, Jake Barnes.

This experience later became A Farewell to Arms. Published in 1929, and with some embellishment of real events, this novel recounts both wounds endured by Hemingway during his time in Italy. It displays that a man can still laugh and eat and drink well if he can love. But when that is ripped away only time can make him strong at the broken places.

Taki Theodoracopulos’ article in The Spectator, The books that made me who I am, assures the above. The ‘behaviour of men under stress’ he writes, was always an endless fascination of Hemingway’s and the importance of conquering one’s fears was one of ‘Papa’s dictums’. Though it can be supposed his fearlessness came later, once death became more than an acquaintance.

‘In order to write about life first you must live it,’ Ernest Hemingway wrote, having lived through it all.

Now, who can say many of the books of today meet such a standard? A standard, I might add, which ought not be neglected.

Taki wrote: ‘The reason the young today are such weenies is the novels they read. Try some Hemingway, you weaklings.’

Now I’m inclined to agree with him, but let’s hope no one gets offended – The Old Man and the Sea already comes with a trigger warning.

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