Flags, parades and speeches celebrate those who fought and died for their country, but what they did--and still do--is better commemorated by silent grieving over them than with bombast and color.
In "A Farewell to Arms," Ernest Hemingway had his World War I soldier saying:
"I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them on proclamations...and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
"There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity...Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene besides the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates."
Today is a day for honoring the fallen but disowning not glorifying what the worst in human nature made them endure.
Showing posts with label Ernest Hemingway. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ernest Hemingway. Show all posts
Monday, May 25, 2009
Thursday, February 28, 2008
W. C. Heinz
The man who died today at the age of 93 wrote about courage and grace under pressure better than anyone of his time.
Bill Heinz was idealized by generations of writers who in the new millennium were still reading his books, articles and collected columns.
We met when I edited a piece of his about Lew Jenkins, a Depression kid from Texas who fought his way up to lightweight champion and then lost everything, breaking his body in motorcycle and car crashes and coming into the ring hurt and drunk.
Bill ran into him during World War II when the former champion was in the Coast Guard landing invasion troops and later after he won a Silver Star as a foot soldier in Korea at the age of 36. The article was the best I worked on during my time at Argosy, a picture of a man who knew how to fight but not how to live with what is called success.
In 1958, Bill wrote a piece for me at Redbook about a young boxer who killed his first opponent in the ring. His novel, "The Professional," had just been published to good reviews, but some critics and readers were put off by the ending. The hero does everything right but loses the big fight in a quirk of fate and then learns to live with it. Fight stories are not supposed to reflect a tragic sense of life.
Ernest Hemingway called it the only good novel about a boxer he had ever read. But what mattered to Bill most did not get into the blurbs. It was the only time I saw him allow himself a moment of pride as he told me:
"Hemingway said he knew it had to end the way it did, but when he got to the last chapter, he threw the book across the room."
Bill Heinz's subject was grace under pressure. He wrote about football coach Vince Lombardi, surgeons in the operating room and Martin Luther King's march on Selma. Along the way, he did a little book about a trauma unit in Korea called "MASH."
Bill Heinz was idealized by generations of writers who in the new millennium were still reading his books, articles and collected columns.
We met when I edited a piece of his about Lew Jenkins, a Depression kid from Texas who fought his way up to lightweight champion and then lost everything, breaking his body in motorcycle and car crashes and coming into the ring hurt and drunk.
Bill ran into him during World War II when the former champion was in the Coast Guard landing invasion troops and later after he won a Silver Star as a foot soldier in Korea at the age of 36. The article was the best I worked on during my time at Argosy, a picture of a man who knew how to fight but not how to live with what is called success.
In 1958, Bill wrote a piece for me at Redbook about a young boxer who killed his first opponent in the ring. His novel, "The Professional," had just been published to good reviews, but some critics and readers were put off by the ending. The hero does everything right but loses the big fight in a quirk of fate and then learns to live with it. Fight stories are not supposed to reflect a tragic sense of life.
Ernest Hemingway called it the only good novel about a boxer he had ever read. But what mattered to Bill most did not get into the blurbs. It was the only time I saw him allow himself a moment of pride as he told me:
"Hemingway said he knew it had to end the way it did, but when he got to the last chapter, he threw the book across the room."
Bill Heinz's subject was grace under pressure. He wrote about football coach Vince Lombardi, surgeons in the operating room and Martin Luther King's march on Selma. Along the way, he did a little book about a trauma unit in Korea called "MASH."
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