Word: fossalta
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Still, a long mythic fiesta between two explosions may not be a bad way to have a life. The first explosion came in Fossalta di Piave in northeastern Italy at midnight on July 8, 1918. A shell from an Austrian trench mortar punctured Hemingway with 200-odd pieces of shrapnel. The wounds validated his manhood, which they had very nearly destroyed. The second explosion came 25 years ago this summer. Early one morning in Ketchum, Idaho, Hemingway (suffering from diabetes, nephritis, alcoholism, severe depression, & hepatitis, hypertension, impotence and paranoid delusions, his memory all but ruined by electroshock treatments) slid...
...react: things were fine and good and true or lovely or wonderful, or else bad, in varying degrees. As the scholar Harry Levin has suggested, Hemingway sent postcards back home: "Having a wonderful time, wish you were here." He worked hard at his writing, and yet the interval between Fossalta and Ketchum was also a kind of permanent vacation: Paris, Pamplona, Africa, Key West, Havana, Wyoming. Readers chained to their jobs and mortgages and hometowns and responsibilities could pick up Hemingway and taste the wine and see the fish jump, and become Hemingway for a little while...
...philosophy-essentially a profound pessimism about the human situation and a stoic sense of tragedy-grew out of war. Like many a child of the times, he was born twice, once in Oak Park, Ill., on July 21, 1899, and a second time during World War I at Fossalta on the Italian Piave on July 8, 1918. At Fossalta, Hemingway, who had switched from ambulance driving to join the Italian infantry, was so badly wounded in a burst of shellfire that he felt life slip from his body, "like you'd pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket...
...raise the Code Hero to something like tragic dignity, there had to be the risk of death. From Fossalta on, Hemingway had death as an obsession; the bullfight gave it to him esthetically, as a ritual, with order and discipline. In Death in the Afternoon, he states his tragic creed flatly: "There is no remedy for anything in life." His Winner Takes Nothing; his lovers lose all. His fictional stages are strewn with corpses. In To Have and Have Not, there are twelve, which compares favorably with the Elizabethans. Nemesis, in the Hemingway tragedy, is bad luck. "I was going...
...high-pitched for the big frame that produces it. For all his years away from his rootland, he speaks with an unmistakable Midwestern twang. Absentmindedly he rubs a star-shaped scar near his right foot, one of the scars left by the mortar shell which gravely wounded him at Fossalta, Italy, in 1918 when he was a volunteer ambulance driver. Nick Adams, hero of many of Hemingway's short stories, was wounded at approximately the same place in much the same way. So was Lieut. Henry of A Farewell to Arms; so was Colonel Cantwell of Across the River...
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