{"id":15959,"date":"2019-04-05T00:31:03","date_gmt":"2019-04-05T00:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=15959"},"modified":"2019-04-06T02:40:44","modified_gmt":"2019-04-06T02:40:44","slug":"did-a-censored-female-writer-inspire-hemingways-famous-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/did-a-censored-female-writer-inspire-hemingways-famous-style\/","title":{"rendered":"Did a censored female writer inspire Hemingway’s famous style?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cynthia Wachtell<\/a>, Yeshiva University<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Virtually everyone has heard of Ernest Hemingway. But you\u2019d be hard-pressed to find someone who knows of Ellen N. La Motte.<\/p>\n

People should. <\/p>\n

She is the extraordinary World War I nurse who wrote like Hemingway before Hemingway. She was arguably the originator of his famous style \u2013 the first to write about World War I using spare, understated, declarative prose.<\/p>\n

Long before Hemingway published \u201cA Farewell to Arms\u201d in 1929 \u2013 long before he even graduated high school and left home to volunteer as an ambulance driver in Italy \u2013 La Motte wrote a collection of interrelated stories titled \u201cThe Backwash of War.\u201d <\/p>\n

Published in the fall of 1916, as the war advanced into its third year, the book is based upon La Motte\u2019s experience working at a French field hospital on the Western Front. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere are many people to write you of the noble side, the heroic side, the exalted side of war,\u201d she wrote. \u201cI must write you of what I have seen, the other side, the backwash.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Backwash of War\u201d was immediately banned in England and France for its criticism of the ongoing war. Two years and multiple printings later \u2013 after being hailed as \u201cimmortal<\/a>\u201d and America\u2019s greatest work of war writing \u2013 it was deemed damaging to morale and also censored in wartime America. <\/p>\n

For nearly a century, it languished in obscurity. But now, an expanded version of this lost classic that I\u2019ve edited has just been published. Featuring the first biography of La Motte, it will hopefully give La Motte the attention she deserves.<\/p>\n

Horrors, not heroes<\/h2>\n

In its time, \u201cThe Backwash of War\u201d was, simply put, incendiary. <\/p>\n

As one admiring reader explained in July 1918, \u201cThere is a corner of my book-shelves which I call my \u2018T N T\u2019 library. Here are all the literary high explosives I can lay my hands on. So far there are only five of them.\u201d \u201cThe Backwash of War\u201d was the only one by a woman and also the only one by an American.<\/p>\n

In most of the era\u2019s wartime works, men willingly fought and died for their cause. The characters were brave, the combat romanticized.<\/p>\n

Not so in La Motte\u2019s stories. Rather than focus on World War I\u2019s heroes, she emphasized its horrors. And the wounded soldiers and civilians she presents in \u201cThe Backwash of War\u201d are fearful of death and fretful in life. <\/p>\n

Filling the beds of the field hospital, they are at once grotesque and pathetic. There is a soldier slowly dying from gas gangrene. Another suffers from syphilis, while one patient sobs and sobs because he does not want to die. A 10-year-old Belgian boy is fatally shot through the abdomen by a fragment of German artillery shell and bawls for his mother.<\/p>\n

War, to La Motte, is repugnant, repulsive and nonsensical. <\/p>\n

The volume\u2019s first story immediately sets the tone: \u201cWhen he could stand it no longer,\u201d it begins, \u201che fired a revolver up through the roof of his mouth, but he made a mess of it.\u201d The soldier is transported, \u201ccursing and screaming,\u201d to the field hospital. There, through surgery, his life is saved but only so that he can later be court-martialed for his suicide attempt and killed by a firing squad. <\/p>\n

\n \"\"
\n A postcard of the French field hospital where La Motte worked.<\/span>
\n Cynthia Wachtell<\/span><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After \u201cThe Backwash of War\u201d was published, readers quickly recognized that La Motte had invented a bold new way of writing about war and its horrors. The New York Times reported<\/a> that her stories were \u201ctold in sharp, quick sentences\u201d that bore no resemblance to conventional \u201cliterary style\u201d and delivered a \u201cstern, strong preachment against war.\u201d <\/p>\n

The Detroit Journal noted<\/a> she was the first to draw \u201cthe real portrait of the ravaging beast.\u201d And the Los Angeles Times gushed<\/a>, \u201cNothing like [it] has been written: it is the first realistic glimpse behind the battle lines\u2026 Miss La Motte has described war \u2013 not merely war in France \u2013 but war itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

La Motte and Gertrude Stein<\/h2>\n

Together with the famous avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein<\/a>, La Motte seems to have influenced what we now think of as Hemingway\u2019s signature style \u2013 his spare, \u201cmasculine<\/a>\u201d prose. <\/p>\n

\n \"\"
\n Gertrude Stein \u2013 who would go on to mentor Hemingway \u2013 was close friends with La Motte.<\/span>
\n Library of Congress<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

La Motte and Stein \u2013 both middle-aged American women, writers and lesbians \u2013 were already friends at the start of the war. Their friendship deepened during the first winter of the conflict, when they were both living in Paris. <\/p>\n

Despite the fact that they each had a romantic partner, Stein seems to have fallen for La Motte. She even wrote a \u201clittle novelette\u201d in early 1915 about La Motte, titled \u201cHow Could They Marry Her?<\/a>\u201d It repeatedly mentions La Motte\u2019s plan to be a war nurse, possibly in Serbia, and includes revealing lines such as \u201cSeeing her makes passion plain.\u201d <\/p>\n

Without a doubt Stein read her beloved friend\u2019s book; in fact, her personal copy of \u201cThe Backwash of War\u201d is presently archived at Yale University.<\/p>\n

Hemingway writes war<\/h2>\n

Ernest Hemingway wouldn\u2019t meet Stein until after the war. But he, like La Motte, found a way to make it to the front lines.<\/p>\n

In 1918, Hemingway volunteered as an ambulance driver and shortly before his 19th birthday was seriously injured by a mortar explosion. He spent five days in a field hospital and then many months in a Red Cross hospital, where he fell in love with an American nurse.<\/p>\n

After the war, Hemingway worked as a journalist in Canada and America. Then, determined to become a serious writer, he moved to Paris in late 1921. <\/p>\n

In the early 1920s Gertrude Stein\u2019s literary salon attracted many of the emerging postwar writers, whom she famously labeled the \u201cLost Generation<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n

Among those who most eagerly sought Stein\u2019s advice was Hemingway, whose style she significantly influenced. <\/p>\n

\u201cGertrude Stein was always right,\u201d Hemingway once told a friend<\/a>. She served as his mentor and became godmother to his son.<\/p>\n

Much of Hemingway\u2019s early writing focused on the recent war. <\/p>\n

\u201cCut out words. Cut everything out,\u201d Stein counseled him<\/a>, \u201cexcept what you saw, what happened.\u201d <\/p>\n

Very likely, Stein showed Hemingway her copy of \u201cThe Backwash of War\u201d as an example of admirable war writing. At the very least, she passed along what she had learned from reading La Motte\u2019s work. <\/p>\n

Whatever the case, the similarity between La Motte\u2019s and Hemingway\u2019s styles is plainly evident. Consider the following passage from the story \u201cAlone,\u201d in which La Motte strings together declarative sentences, neutral in tone, and lets the underlying horror speak for itself.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThey could not operate on Rochard and amputate his leg, as they wanted to do. The infection was so high, into the hip, it could not be done. Moreover, Rochard had a fractured skull as well. Another piece of shell had pierced his ear, and broken into his brain, and lodged there. Either wound would have been fatal, but it was the gas gangrene in his torn-out thigh that would kill him first. The wound stank. It was foul.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Now consider these opening lines from a chapter of Hemingway\u2019s 1925 collection \u201cIn Our Time\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cNick sat against the wall of the church where they had dragged him to be clear of machine-gun fire in the street. Both legs stuck out awkwardly. He had been hit in the spine. His face was sweaty and dirty. The sun shone on his face. The day was very hot. Rinaldi, big backed, his equipment sprawling, lay face downward against the wall. Nick looked straight ahead brilliantly\u2026. Two Austrian dead lay in the rubble in the shade of the house. Up the street were other dead.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Hemingway\u2019s declarative sentences and emotionally uninflected style strikingly resemble La Motte\u2019s.<\/p>\n

So why did Hemingway receive all of the accolades, culminating in a Nobel Prize in 1954<\/a> for the \u201cinfluence he exerted on contemporary style,\u201d while La Motte was lost to literary oblivion? <\/p>\n

Was it the lasting impact of wartime censorship? Was it the prevalent sexism of the postwar era, which viewed war writing as the purview of men? <\/p>\n

Whether due to censorship, sexism or a toxic combination of the two, La Motte was silenced and forgotten. It\u2019s time to return \u201cThe Backwash of War\u201d to its proper perch as a seminal example of war writing.<\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n
\n
Cynthia Wachtell is the editor of a new edition of:<\/header>\n

The Backwash of War: An Extraordinary American Nurse in World War I<\/a>\"The<\/p>\n