Hemingway’s war-wounded: a new interpretation of Brett Ashley

And worse I may be yet: the worst is not
So long as we can say, “ This is the worst.”
—King Lear

I

An obscure reference in The Sun Also Rises (1926) to Brett Ashley ’ s experience as a V.A.D., ignored by readers and critics, provides the crucial clue to her tragic character. Hemingway does not describe her years as a civilian nurse for the British army in a Voluntary Aid Detachment. But her exposure to the horrors of war explains why she

wants to forget her ruined life and lose herself in drink and sex. The alcoholic and nymphomaniac is a non-combatant casualty of World War I.

Most young V.A.D. women, after twenty years of sheltered genteel life, had never been intimate with a man outside their family, never seen a naked man and never had sexual intercourse. But, after the sudden change from having servants to becoming one, they were thrown into close contact with many severely wounded and emotionally wrecked young soldiers. Agatha Christie, another V.A.D., wrote in her posthumously published Autobiography (1977), “ Our early cases came in straight from the trenches with field dressings on, and their heads full of lice…It was a shock to us all.”

The V.A.D. wore a demure but attractive uniform: dark blue dress down to her ankles, high stiff collar, long white headscarf, and white starched apron with straps crossed at the back and red cross on her chest. Vera Brittain ’ s Testament of Youth (1933) noted the difference between the Florence Nightingale ideal of the nurse and the rough reality of their life: “ In a surgical ward the nurses hardly occupy the silent-footed, gliding role which they always do in story-books and on the stage.” Bound by strict rules, they were “ allowed to run only in cases of haemorrhage or fire”.

Most volunteers, like Brett Ashley, came from the middle and upper classes, and were not used to the hardships and severe discipline of military hospitals. Though they lacked the experience and advanced skills of trained nurses, they were often snobbishly critical of their middle-aged, salaried superiors. Brittain emphasised the intense hostility between the two kinds of nurses. The volunteers drove some of the professionals “ almost frantic with jealousy and suspicion, which grew in intensity as the V.A.D.s increased in competence…The longer a V.A.D. had performed the responsible work that fell to her on active service, the more resolutely her Ward-Sister appeared to relegate her to the most menial and elementary tasks.”

The V.A.D.s endured harsh living conditions, worked long, exhausting hours and had a nervous horror of making potentially fatal mistakes. They suffered from septic infections from their patients, including the delicately abbreviated “ d. and v.” (diarrhoea and vomiting). Some were exposed to lethal diseases such as malaria, influenza and tuberculosis. The volunteers could hear the explosions caused by big guns, not only from behind the lines in France, but even across the Channel from the south coast of England. Their well-marked hospital ships were attacked by German submarines, their hospitals in France shelled by artillery. While self-sacrificially serving, many women heard that their brothers, friends and fianc é s had been killed.

The V.A.D.s ’ work ranged from disgusting duties and dealing with crazy, traumatised patients to repairing wounds and assisting at operations. There was the endless routine of emptying bed-pans and urinals, cleaning up vomit and blood, inserting suppositories and scrubbing floors while rats ran around them in the dark—all this amid the penetrating odour of suppurating injuries. A paralytic patient drove Brittain half-insane by screaming like an animal all through the night. She was also “ chased up and down the hut by a stark naked six-foot-four New Zealander in the fighting stage of delirium . . . his fury exploding in a torrent” of vile and abusive language.

All the V.A.D.s saw grotesquely mutilated men and the slaughterhouse of gangrenous wounds, with the bones laid bare. Christie had to carry an amputated leg down to the cellar and throw it into the furnace. Brittain recalled with a shudder, “ I had seen men without faces, without eyes, without limbs, men almost disembowelled, men with hideous truncated stumps of bodies. . . . Stopping haemorrhages, replacing intestines and draining and re-inserting innumerable rubber tubes in that foetid stench was a regular baptism of blood and pus.”

Worst of all were the mustard gas victims. Their skin was burned from their bodies as if they had been flayed alive and they gasped for breath with corrupted lungs. One of her patient s, rolling his eyes and choking in continuous paroxysms, died of convulsions. Most repulsive to look at were the abdominal operations, made even worse by the heat and ether in the room. The sight of bloody wounds made many women faint, and Christie had to turn her “ eyes away from the original incision with the knife”.

The V.A.D.s also had to deal with their patients ’ psychological problems as well as their own. As Wilfred Owen wrote in the preface to his Poems , “ My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” The wounded soldiers needed emotional as well as physical comfort, with tender hair-stroking at bedtime and hand-holding in the dark. (There ’ s a poignant moment in film of The English Patient when a wounded soldier begs for a kiss and his wish is granted by the Canadian nurse.)

In order to protect themselves and work efficiently, the volunteers had to harden their hearts against the suffering patients and “ force all the warmth out of themselves before they could be really good nurses.” Ironically, Brittain also had to treat German prisoners of war, whose comrades had recently attempted to kill her brother. Englishmen first tried to kill the Germans, then Englishwomen tried to save them. More hopeless than the British soldiers, the German prisoners bore their wounds with stoical fortitude and waited phlegmatically to die.

Brittain had to watch many mutilated bodies bleeding to death, and witness the waste of legions of men die before they had had a real chance to live. All the deaths seemed meaningless, and most survivors felt guilty about being alive. The severely wounded men were bribed with medals and paid with pensions for their lost youth and ruined lives. Like the injured soldiers, Brittain was plagued by gruesome memories of fear and guilt long after the war was over. Both victims and volunteers found it difficult to readjust to civilian life. These V.A.D. patients were very different from the photograph of the smiling, healthy-looking young Hemingway recovering from his leg wounds in the Red Cross hospital in Milan in July 1918. His leg was healing, he was in love with his nurse and he seems happy rather than traumatised.

II

The real Duff Twysden (1892-1938) (pictured above, third from left, in hat) was significantly different from Hemingway ’ s dramatically heightened Brett Ashley. Born Mary Duff Smurthwaite in Richmond, Yorkshire, the daughter of a wine-shop owner, she was not, despite her title, an aristocrat. Her parents were divorced; she was educated in Paris and fluent in French; she was tall and thin (not voluptuous). In 1915 she was divorced from Edward Byrom, who cited a co-respondent. Two years later she married Sir Roger Twysden, 10th baronet and a commander in the Royal Navy. Duff divorced Roger in 1926. His family was given custody of their son Anthony (1918-1946), who died prematurely, possibly related to service in World War II.

In 1928 she married her third husband, the amateur American painter Clinton King (1901-79), who was nine years younger than Duff. He was heir to a Texas candy fortune but his family, suspecting that Duff was after his money, cut off his funds. During their ten-year happy marriage, they lived modestly from 1930 to 1932 in Chapala, Mexico, where D. H. Lawrence wrote The Plumed Serpent. In 1933 they moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she may have gone to treat her neglected tubercular lesions. In 1938 Mary Duff Sterling Smurthwaite Byrom Twysden King died there at the age of forty-six.

Hemingway was attracted to older women when he was young: the Milan nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, his first wife Hadley Richardson, Duff Twysden and his second wife Pauline Pfieffer; and to much younger women when he was old: Jigee Viertel, Adriana Ivancich and Valerie Danby-Smith. He met Duff in Paris in 1925. She was not a great beauty, but her title, and her androgynous short hair, boyish looks and manly dress appealed to him. She was (unlike Hadley) chic, witty, sexy, reckless, self-destructive, exciting, and a great drinking companion. Though he felt constrained by his marriage, Hemingway lusted after her.

In The Sun Also Rises Brett Ashley ’ s traumatic experience as a V.A.D. has transformed the bright young woman into a wounded spirit. Hemingway slowly reveals her complex character, and she first appears in chapter 3 with a group of homosexuals, outsiders like herself who make no sexual demands on her. Jake Barnes rages against the homosexuals, who are sexually active but don ’ t want women. He wants women but, with his genitals injured in the war, he is impotent. He also attacks Jews because Robert Cohn has had a brief affair with Brett. When Cohn first sees Brett, Hemingway wittily alludes to Moses after wandering for forty years in the wilderness: “ He looked a great deal as his compatriot must have looked when he saw the promised land. . . . She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.” But Brett, who loves only Jake, is “ afraid of so many things.” As self-punishment for her fear and guilt as a wartime nurse, she “ only wanted what she couldn ’ t have”.

In chapter 5 Jake tells Cohn the essential facts about the tragic background of the 34-year-old Brett. “ She was a V.A.D. in a hospital I was in during the war.” She has seen Jake ’ s wound and is also psychologically wounded. While she was a volunteer, “ her own true love had just kicked off with the dysentery,” a degrading rather than heroic death. On the rebound, she has married Ashley, who became shell-shocked (PTSD) and half-crazy. Much later and with bitter understatement, Hemingway reveals that “ Ashley, chap she got the title from, was a sailor, you know. Ninth baronet. When he came home he wouldn ’ t sleep in a bed. Always made Brett sleep on the floor. Finally, when he got really bad, he used to tell her he ’ d kill her. Always slept with a loaded service revolver. Brett used to take the shells out when he ’ d gone to sleep. She hasn ’ t had an absolutely happy life.” Hemingway adds that “ Her name ’ s Lady Ashley. Brett ’ s her own name.” She ’ s “ in the stud book,” Burke ’ s Peerage, but will lose the title when she divorces Ashley. “ She ’ s a drunk” and is going to marry Mike Campbell, who ’ s also a drunk and a bankrupt.

Meanwhile, in a subtle and rarely noticed scene in chapter 7, Brett and Jake enjoy some sort of rare sexual pleasure: “ Then later [she says]: ‘ Do you feel better, darling? Is the head any better? ’ . . . ‘ Couldn ’ t we live together, Brett? Couldn ’ t we just live together?’ ” But her sexual desire is too great and she replies, “ I don ’ t think so. I ’ d just tromper[deceive] you with everybody. You couldn ’ t stand it.” Jake must pay a cruel price for her love and his devotion. He ’ s forced to witness Brett ’ s liaisons with a diverse group of lovers: the infatuated American Jew Robert Cohn in San Sebastiá n, her Scottish Presbyterian fianc é Mike Campbell in Paris, and the teenaged Spanish Catholic bullfighter Pedro Romero in Madrid. All her love affairs end badly.

Like many V.A.D.s, unable to reconcile the horrors of war with the existence of God, Brett has lost her religious belief. She wants to hear Jake go to Catholic confession and talk about her, but she has no hat and is refused admission to the church. In Pamplona she egoistically behaves as if the fiesta were being staged in her honour. A group of drunken Spaniards dance wildly around her and worship her as a pagan goddess. Cohn bitterly calls her a Circe who turns men into swine. Without restraint, always acting impulsively and doing exactly what she wants to do, Brett pursues sex without love while Jake pursues love without sex. He tries to escape from the decadence of Paris to the outdoor freedom of Spain. He sees the running of the bulls in Pamplona, fishes in the Pyrenees and swims in San Sebastián. But, like Brett, he cannot cure his war wounds.

Unlike most Englishwomen Brett, familiar with blood and death, is fascinated by the savage and cathartic spectacle of the corrida . She wants to see Pedro Romero get dressed in his satin matador ’ s traje de luces (skin-tight so the bull ’ s horns won ’ t catch the cloth) and says he must use a shoe horn to slide into it. Always unconstrained and free, she falls in love with the nineteen-year-old Romero—half her age— right after she sees him kill the bulls. Against his better judgment and at the cost of his valued friendship with the hotel owner Montoya, Jake helps Brett start her affair with Romero and distract him at the height of the bullfighting season. Caught in a masochistic trap, Jake pimps for Brett and observes the symbolic debris in the caf é while she makes love with the matador. But Jake ’ s awkward role allows him, at least, to participate vicariously in her liaison. Hemingway doesn ’ t describe Brett ’ s love scenes with Romero, but powerfully suggests the psychological and moral effects of their relations.

Brett goes off with Romero, as she had with Cohn before Pamplona, then forces him to leave her as suddenly as she ’ d left Cohn. She then summons Jake for emotional support and makes her confession to him. Romero, who ’ d learned English as a waiter in Gibraltar, wants to marry her. But in her first moral act, she has made the gran rifiuto before she damages his career. She tells Jake she was not “ going to be one of these bitches that ruins children. . . . It makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.
. . . It ’ s sort of what we have instead of God.” But she doesn ’ t love Jake enough to make the same kind of sexual renunciation for him.

The careless Brett, fatally damaged by her experience as a V.A.D., leaves a trail of broken hearts and emotional misery behind her. Jake and Brett come together at the end of the novel, as they did at the beginning, but remain in the same paralysed state. With no redemptive saviour and no hope for the future, Brett remains an alcoholic, tragically unfulfilled, miserable about her wrecked marriage to Ashley and her doomed love for Jake. She finally decides to return to the hopeless Mike Campbell and confesses, “ He ’ s so damned nice and he ’ s so awful. He ’ s my sort of thing.”

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