The Post-War, Wounded, Soldier Flâneur in the novels of Ernest Hemingway: The Emergence of the Soldier Flâneur (original) (raw)

The Post-War, Wounded, Soldier Flâneur in the novels of Ernest Hemingway Hemingway’s service with the American Red Cross during the First World War was pivotal not only because of the “raw source material” it provided him as a writer, but also because his observations of warfare, combat, and casualties, together with being wounded in the line of duty, influenced the kind of writer he would become and his authorial decision to write several novels from the point of view of shrewdly observant wounded soldier and veteran protagonists. According to James McGrath Morris, Hemingway and fellow expatriate writer John Dos Passos “had confronted hardships and danger to a lesser degree than the soldiers, but they had also been afforded a greater view than that seen from the trenches….six years after the end of the conflict, [they] burned to put on paper what they had seen and experienced. The Great War was over, but not for them. Not yet.” I agree with Morris that Hemingway “sought to describe the desolate [post-WWI] world with honest clarity,” and will add in this paper that his observations, experiences, and wounding as an ambulance driver, as recorded in his letters and reflected in the observations and experiences of the soldier and veteran protagonists of his major novels, were pivotal in establishing the existence of a 20th-century flâneur. I can’s stress enough the significance of the injuries Hemingway sustained to his legs and feet as an ambulance driver, injuries that temporarily affected his ability to walk. From a letter dated August 18, 1918, written from his hospital in Milano and addressed “Dear Folks,” the convalescent young Hemingway writes: “’The 227 wounds…. didn’t hurt a bit at the time…. my feet felt like I had rubber boots full of water on. Hot water…. The machine gun bullet just felt like a sharp smack on my leg with an icy snow ball...my pants looked like somebody had made current jelly in them and then punched holes to let the pulp out…. So we took off my trousers and the old limbs were still there, but gee they were a mess… both knees shots through and my right shoe punctured two big places.” (176-77). Later in same letter: “The Italian Surgeon…. assures me that I will be able to walk as well as ever.…. I’ll have to learn to walk again” (Selected Letters 177-178). Hemingway learns to walk again and does the majority of that walking in the streets of Paris after moving to Europe to work as a journalist and write fiction. His experience as an ambulance driver, followed by his work as a journalist and war correspondent, honed his critical eye in ways that made him what Kronenberger refers to as a “‘synthetic observer’” (quoted in Williams, 35), while living, writing, and walking as an expatriate in Montparnasse allowed him to participate in post-war vestiges of flånerie similar to that of 19th -century artist-flâneurs like Charles Baudelaire. As Hemingway’s experience shows, the post-war wounded flâneur, despite and perhaps because of suffering physical or psychological wounding, walks and observes and records—with a different kind of detachment than his predecessor—the modern spectacle of war that destroyed the cities that had produced the flâneur in the first place.