The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization Thomas K. Meier Gandal, Keith. The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xii + 271pp. $55.00. Keith Gandal’s The Gun and the Pen is an ambitious and important book that deserves the scrutiny of a wide scholarly audience. He sets out to do nothing less than to redefine critical understanding of American fiction beginning with the novels of the 1920s involving soldiers and other literary characters affected by World War I. His method, though limited in scope, serves him well; he restricts his study primarily to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Gandal’s major contentions (among many) regard the ways that settled opinion and widespread critical consensus have poorly or wrongly interpreted vital areas of inquiry into early twentieth-century American fiction: first, regarding the actual conditions under which men served or not in the World War I military as well as the type and experience of their wartime assignments; second, regarding a hitherto unnoticed critical understanding of the social effects of the radical changes of personnel policies in the “New Army” of the United States during World War I; and third, regarding identifying the origin of the sexual mores of the “new woman” of the 1920s as portrayed in American novels. The first contention, which will undoubtedly (and perhaps unfortunately) receive the most attention from fellow literary scholars, is Gandal’s reformulation of the concept of war wounds and other lasting effects of war upon its veterans by introducing a new concept, that of “mobilization wounds.” In contrast to the medical or psychological ravages visited by war on young men, the concept of mobilization wounds is a sociological one, the damage to one’s self-esteem or perceived status as a result of not being accepted (mobilized) into the military or by not being commissioned an officer. (Until the middle of the Vietnam War, we may recall, the Congressional commission conferred on its recipients the status of both “Officer and Gentleman.”) Gandal’s mobilization-wound concept is wide-reaching, also subtracting status for not being sent to a theater of war (or not to a major theater), not being given troops to command, not achieving high rank, or not being tested in combat. This mobilization wound concept could well become a new critical instrument for the study and understanding of American war literature from World War I onward. A difficulty with Gandal’s book, however, is the apparent conflation of a fictional character’s mobilization wounds with those Gandal imputes to the author himself. He maintains that all three of the writers themselves have mobilization wounds, inflicted by the circumstances of their own mobilization. A mobilization deficit worthy of the term “wound,” however, should perhaps cross some common-sense threshold of lack of worthiness. None of the three writers even approached such a threshold in their own lives; all were volunteers, and all saw service. As Gandal himself points out, Hemingway was “the first American to be wounded on the Italian front in World War I” (4); he does not prove the point that the three authors or their peers saw them as socially “emasculated” by mobilization wounds, “which were at once inescapable and embarrassing” (5). Too young for the military, and with a bad eye that barred him from the U.S. Air Corps, Hemingway nevertheless sought to take part in the war as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross and saw action. Faulkner was too small for the Air Corps but joined the Canadian Air Force. While the circumstances of their mobilization no doubt rankled them, they were by no means “slackers.” As for Fitzgerald, he was actually commissioned into the infantry and promoted to First Lieutenant although [End Page 383] not seen as fit for a combat command. Given his well-documented erratic ways, his peers must have been amazed that one so seemingly unsuited to military life would have done as well as he did. Just as Gandal has created a new way...