Hemingway and the Harvard Poets ed. by Luca Fondazione

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hemingway and the Harvard Poets ed. by Luca Fondazione Mark Cirino Hemingway and the Harvard Poets. Edited by Luca Fondazione. Museo Hemingway e della Grande Guerra, 2020. 116 pp. Paperback €15.00. The Museo Hemingway e della Grande Guerra has published the third volume in their series of lavishly illustrated, bilingual editions devoted to a celebration of Hemingway’s Italian life and work, following the attractive and informative Hemingway and the Great War (2016) and On Hemingway’s Trail in the Veneto (2017). Hemingway and the Harvard Poets focuses on Hemingway’s association with a group of men from Harvard University who volunteered to serve with the American Red Cross on the Italian front of World War I. These men made up Section One, stationed at Villa Ca’ Erizzo in Bassano del Grappa—the current site of the Hemingway war museum—northwest of Venice on the banks of the Brenta River. Hemingway, of course, was never a college student of any kind, much less from an Ivy League school, but he might have said of his war service, like Melville’s Ishmael said of whaling, that the war “was my Yale College and my Harvard.” This book cites John Dos Passos’s similar statement in an interview: “I suppose that Word War I then became my university.” Hemingway and the Harvard poets—Dos Passos, Sydney Fairbanks, Dudley Poore, John Howard Lawson, and Henry Serrano Villard—all display an artistic bent, a curious impulse, and share similar coming-of-age experiences, in another country. The war served as a crucible experience for these six intelligent, creative, ambitious, and restless men who would always cite that experience in Bassano as a moment of historical and personal upheaval. After a brief contextual Preface by the museum’s curator, Giandomenico Cortese, a second Preface follows, by Corydon Ireland, formerly of the Harvard Gazette, who corrects any misperception that Harvard might have cloistered its students from war service. As Ireland points out, the opposite was true. Many men clung to the expectation of military representation from the finest American schools. Harvard students, Ireland writes, were “quick to join the fray,” and also cites E.E. Cummings’s The Enormous Room (1922) as an example of enduring artistic achievements from Harvard students—Cummings graduated in 1915—that dramatized the war experience. The Enormous Room is a novel praised both by Hemingway and, in the excerpt “On Writing,” by his character Nick Adams. The next chapter draws from the essential work of Italian scholar Giovanni Cecchin, who historicizes the Italian front in the fall of 1917, when these Harvard men would have arrived. Cecchin writes that following the debacle of [End Page 123] the Italian defeat at Caporetto, the dire need for American volunteers became evident to the Italian government, which then sought the influx of American university students. Cecchin’s chapter includes a photograph of the roster of Section One volunteers, where the familiar names “Dos Passos, John R.” and “Villard, Henry S.” are among dozens listed. The next five chapters, all written in both English and Italian by Martina Mastandrea, are devoted to the six main figures of this book: Hemingway, Dos Passos, Villard, Fairbanks, Poore, and Lawson. Mastandrea’s chapter about Dos Passos, called “One Harvard Man’s Initiation,” is generously illustrated with Dos Passos’s own evocative pastel drawings of Bassano. Mastandrea notes that as a Harvard student Dos Passos’s antipathy for the war did not supersede his “curiosity to witness the fighting first-hand” (34). The same ambivalence towards the war in Dos Passos’s fictional characters marked his own personal stance at that time, as well as that of the rest of this group. “Dos and his fellow Harvard Poets,” writes Mastandrea, “were pacifists who enlisted exclusively to help wounded soldiers and disapproved of bloodshed in the name of a cause that most of the soldiers did not understand” (39). Hemingway and the Harvard Poets wisely explores interactions between the figures, so that a narrative emerges of a group sharing an integrated experience, rather than each writer isolated into discrete siloes. These descriptions advance the project’s aim, to chronicle a group of Harvard writers, not merely a...