War + Ink by Paul Steven;Sinclair Gail;Trout Steven;

Author:Paul, Steven;Sinclair, Gail;Trout, Steven;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Kent State University Press

HEMINGWAY’S “SOLDIER’S HOME”

The Kansas Welcome Association, Abbreviations, and World War I Archives

DARYL W. PALMER

It goes without saying that Ernest Hemingway learned something from “The Star Copy Style,” the reporter’s rules of engagement at the Kansas City Star. As Hemingway explained to a reporter from the same paper in 1940: “‘Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing. I’ve never forgotten them’ ” (quoted in Fenton 34). In order to illustrate what the author learned, scholars have liked to quote the guide’s opening words: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.” Fenton declares that “Nothing Hemingway might learn in the next decade of apprenticeship would supplant this precept” (31). Of course, there are many other lessons embedded in the style sheet. Most of them seem quite mundane. Never “split verbs.” “Numbers less than 100 should be spelled out….” Here and there, something like wit emerges: “Don’t say ‘He had his leg cut off in an accident.’ He wouldn’t have had it done for anything.” Taken as a whole, these rules demand that the writer say more with less and be consistent in so doing. For instance, in the fourth paragraph of the sheet, Hemingway read, “Use Kas., not Kan. or Kans., as an abbreviation for Kansas.” Because it is easy to underestimate the way this sort of advice might inform Hemingway’s attempt to make sense of his own war experience, I offer a case study triggered by the first two sentences of “Soldier’s Home”: “Krebs went to the war from a Methodist college in Kansas. There is a picture which shows him [Krebs] among his fraternity brothers, all of them wearing exactly the same height and style collar” (89). A fine illustration of “the Star Copy Style,” these two short sentences in a short first paragraph frame the story as a whole, and the word Kansas stands as an abbreviation—for a state, for a point of origin, for a set of postwar experiences at the beginning of the twentieth century. Using Hemingway’s own terminology, I suggest that this abbreviated Kansas is the tip of the iceberg in our understanding of a soldier’s homecoming after World War I.1

A few caveats are in order at the outset. I do not claim to have discovered Hemingway’s secret agenda in “Soldier’s Home,” which Hemingway called “the best short story I ever wrote” (Selected Letters 139). I am not claiming to have found source documents that Hemingway read and reworked. I have no way of proving that Hemingway intended his readers to extend his reference to Kansas in the ways I am about to do. Instead, I follow Steven Trout and presume that “‘Soldier’s Home’ also examines the problems encountered by a group to which Hemingway did not actually belong; namely, the combat veterans of the American Expeditionary Force (A.E.F.)” (Trout, “Where Do We Go From Here?” 5). More particularly, I suggest that Hemingway prompts us to think about World War I, soldiers’ homecomings, and Kansas.

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