The Hidden Sexual Taboo in Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” Part 1

By Christopher Morse

"A Moveable Read," from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, publishes a variety of analyses and points of view about Ernest Hemingway's life and works. Individual articles may not reflect the views and opinions of the Foundation.

Ernest Hemingway’s short fiction brims with both violence and sex. Due to the restrictions of his time, the sex is rarely graphic. Sexual matters are broached via hints, euphemisms, and half-finished sentences. In the story discussed in this essay, for example, we are told repeatedly that the main character “wants a girl”; we have to infer what he wants one for.

Still, sex is prominent throughout the Hemingway canon, and little of it is conventionally “lawful”—procreative and conducted within the confines of marriage. Much of it is casual and between near-strangers. Quite a lot is outside the standards of the era. Lesbianism (called “perversion”) is central to “The Sea Change.” Pederasty is the undertone of “A Simple Inquiry.” Brother-sister incest is alluded to in “The Battler.” There is underage coupling: a girl of twelve or so is the first love of the equally young Nick Adams.

To hint at incest and underage sex combined would be risqué even for Hemingway, but my analysis suggests that he did just that in his 1925 story, “Soldier’s Home.”

In the summer of 1919 Harold Krebs reluctantly returns home from war. Because he has served several months with the occupation in Germany following the Armistice, it is now too late for a hero’s welcome. Life has moved on in his Oklahoma town. People are unreceptive when he wants to speak of his war experiences, and eventually he gives up trying.

Although it may not show, Krebs most likely suffers from shell shock—what we would call post-traumatic stress disorder. He must handle it on his own. So far, at least in his view, he is doing well. His personal therapy consists of keeping everything calm and simple. Krebs does very little in the weeks following his return: he sleeps late, reads on the front porch, strolls about the town, frequents its cool, dim pool hall.

The one issue troubling him is girls. In what may seem an overwritten passage, taking up a full quarter of the text, Krebs gazes with yearning at the young women passing along the sidewalk. He vacillates, wanting them but seeing himself no part of their world, wanting them but feeling enervated at the thought of the courting, of the complex politics, of all the talking and lies required to get them. It isn’t worth it. Krebs would like things to remain uncomplicated forever. He takes comfort in an almost mystical truth he learned in the army: “When you were really ripe for a girl you always got one. You did not have to think about it. Sooner or later it would come.”

Apart from his preoccupation with girls, Krebs feels all right: “Things were getting good again.” He appears content to remain in his detached state indefinitely.

Unfortunately, his parents do not share his equanimity. They feel dismayed over their son’s idleness and lack of ambition. The story’s climactic episode is a difficult conversation—mostly a lecture—between Krebs and his mother. This scene, contrasting the banal, workaday values with which the young man was raised against the alienated consciousness that trauma has produced in him, is one of Hemingway’s most remarkable passages, and quite rightly it receives the most critical attention.

Just prior to this scene, however, often overlooked, Krebs holds a friendly chat with his younger sister. Helen, perhaps 10 or 11 years old, dutifully brings her brother the morning paper, then sits at the breakfast table, just watching him read and eat cereal. She then invites him to come to her school that afternoon to see her play indoor baseball:

“I can pitch better than lots of the boys. I tell them all you taught me. The other girls aren't much good."

"Yeah?" said Krebs.

"I tell them all you're my beau. Aren't you my beau, Hare?"

"You bet."

"Couldn't your brother really be your beau just because he's your brother?"

"I don't know."

"Sure you know. Couldn't you be my beau, Hare, if I was old enough and if you wanted to?"

"Sure. You're my girl now."

"Am I really your girl?"

"Sure."

"Do you love me?"

"Uh, huh."

"Do you love me always?"

"Sure."

"Will you come over and watch me play indoor?"

"Maybe."

"Aw, Hare, you don't love me. If you loved me, you'd want to come over and watch me play indoor."

Prosaic on the surface, this makes for a puzzling exchange in the context of the story. Helen has little to do with the action. We can brush it off as a cute interlude, a sister so happy to have her idolized big brother home safe and letting him know in her clumsy, puppyish way how much she loves him. The problem is, Ernest Hemingway didn’t waste time on cute interludes. “Soldier’s Home” is a carefully honed work of literature—the author himself considered it his best short story—and so we must ask why he chose to give Krebs a sister and to insert her here to hold precisely this conversation. Was it simply to provide Krebs with a pal, one person in this town whom he likes and feels comfortable around? Or, perhaps, is Helen meant to represent Krebs himself, the wide-eyed innocent he was before leaving his small town for the World War? The former explanation sounds nice but seems a slender justification for the girl’s presence; the latter is both imprecise and sentimental (while Hemingway was neither). The siblings’ conversation may enhance the story, but it is not integral. Helen could be eliminated entirely with no real loss to the narrative.

But read it again. Forget for the moment that the speakers are a brother, aged about 20, and his kid sister. Helen is offering herself to Krebs as a lover. Read simply as words on a page it is hard to interpret this passage any other way. If a 17-year-old neighbor girl had dropped by to speak something like Helen’s lines, we’d have no doubt that the prophecy which army life taught Krebs had been fulfilled.  

End Part 1. In Part 2 of this blog, the author will explore more extensively the underage incestuous undertones of “A Soldier’s Home.”

About the Author

Christopher More is a freelance writer, actor, and rare book dealer, residing in the arts-oriented mountain community of Idyllwild, California. He is currently at work on a theatrical adaptation of several of Hemingway’s early short stories, tentatively entitled, Hemingway in Seven Acts.