Now I Lay Me

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
From Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms & Other Writings 1927–1932

Interesting Links

“Young Mr. Hemingway in Italy” (Steve Paul, National WWI Museum)

“The Vulnerable Private Writings of Ernest Hemingway” (Sandra Spanier, LitHub)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “In Another Country,” Ernest Hemingway
• “Wounded—How It Feels to Be Shot,” Floyd Gibbons
• “Alone,” Ellen N. La Motte
• “An Episode of War,” Stephen Crane

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Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms & Other Writings 1927-1932
Men Without Women | A Farewell to Arms | Death in the Afternoon | selected letters | 1.037 pages
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Ernest Hemingway recovering at the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan, Italy, in the summer of 1918. (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

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A few weeks after Ernest Hemingway began work as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy during the first World War, he volunteered for canteen service on the front lines, outside the town of Fossalta on the Piave River. On the night of July 8, 1918, he was about one hundred yards behind the Italian trenches when he was hit by an Austrian trench mortar, which landed less than a yard away, followed almost immediately by a machine gun bullet. The twenty-six-year-old Italian soldier standing next to Hemingway was instantly killed.

"I died then,” Hemingway later told his friend Guy Hickok. “I felt my soul or something coming right out of my body, like you'd pull as silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner. It flew around and then came back and went in again and I wasn’t dead anymore.” A month later, in a letter to his family, he described the scene:

After I came to they carried me on a stretcher three kilometers back to a dressing station. The stretcher bearers had to go over lots because the road was having the “entrails” shelled out of it. . . . The dressing station had been evacuated during the attack so I lay for two hours in a stable, with the roof shot off, waiting for an ambulance. When it came I ordered it down the road to get the soldiers that had been wounded first. It came back with a load and then they lifted me in. The shelling was still pretty thick and our batteries were going off all the time way back of us and the big 250s and 350s [mortar shells] going over head for Austria with a noise like a railway train.

He was transported to the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan, where he spent the next ten weeks recovering from mortar fragment wounds (“227 little devils”) in his legs and feet.

This formative, tragic experience was, to varying extents, transformed into fiction in several of Hemingway’s works—most famously in A Farewell to Arms but also notably in “Now I Lay Me,” one of the two dozen Hemingway stories featuring the character Nick Adams. The link between author and character in this story is reinforced, in the view of some scholars, by an early draft in which Nick’s mother refers to him as Ernie, which Hemingway crossed out and replaced with Nicky. The story has often been paired with another semiautobiographical story, “In Another Country,” featuring an unnamed wounded soldier (almost universally assumed to be Nick Adams) recovering in a military hospital in Milan. Hemingway himself used the title “In Another Country—Two” for an early draft of “Now I Lay Me.”

The story opens with Nick lying on the floor in a silkworm house. More than one scholar has compared the subsequent series of reflections and memories to a “therapeutic talk-session” for addressing post-combat stress. The tendency among many critics, then, has been to treat Nick on a bed of straw as if he were Ernest on a couch. Yet Paul Smith, in his Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, cautions against approaching the story as a fictionalized memoir:

As with other stories, it seems that the apparently autobiographical nature of “Now I Lay Me” has chilled any interest in its literary sources; and if so, there is an irony in the fact that so little of its narrative can be corroborated as personal history. Hemingway was wounded (once, not twice as was Nick); suffered from insomnia; slept one night on a visit with two friends in a silk “factory” (before, not after he was wounded, as Nick was); he loved trout fishing and cherished his recollections of the sport; and when he was six, his grandfather died, his family moved from the grandfather’s house in which Ernest was born to “a new house designed and built” by his mother when he was seven. If the rest of the story is not fiction, it is still, in varying degrees, unsubstantiated “fact.”

Nevertheless, Smith adds, “the more important elements of the story, all those so precisely and dramatically realized, have been taken by one biographer after another as personal experience and then read by later critics, in turn, as biographical evidence to support an interpretation—most often a psychological one—of the story.” Or, as another scholar suggests, “Autobiographical assumption is virtually automatic among those who write about Nick. On the other hand, those who read the Nick stories generally become caught up in his experience, and eschew the vast Hemingway scholarship, for the time, to respond to Nick as his own person.”

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The above quote from Guy Hickock appeared in “A Portrait of Mister Papa,” a profile of Hemingway by Malcolm Cowley in the January 10, 1949, issue of Life magazine.

Notes to the story: Tenente is Italian for lieutenant. In 1918, American journalist Arthur Brisbane was editor of the Hearst-owned Chicago Harold and Examiner. The story concludes with mention of the October offensive, or the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, October 24, 1918–November 3, 1918, an Italian victory that led to Austria’s suing for an armistice.

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That night we lay on the floor in the room and I listened to the silk-worms eating. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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