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The great calamity of the US Civil War was the impetus for major changes in American fiction. This brother-against-brother engagement not only profoundly disrupted American society but also precipitated a dramatic alteration in the way serious novelists wrote about the experience of combat. This war between the states promulgated an American war novel tradition that remained essentially unchanged until the end of the Vietnam War. The advent of new and highly destructive war technologies outstripped military tactics, causing the dramatic increases in the number and severity of causalities and destruction. This conflict multiplied the tragic and traumatic consequences of modern war in a very short amount of time. Concomitantly, the use of the photographic camera on the battlefield brought the war’s frightful arithmetic to the home front and helped change the literary expectations of a nation from romanticism to realism and naturalism and, later, modernism.

The American Civil War initiated what would become a deepening level of trauma throughout American culture that continued throughout the war-plagued Twentieth Century. As a consequence, developments in post-war

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American literature made the realistic depiction of death and dying a widespread phenomenon. Modern American war fiction, which was written beginning in the immediate post-World War I period, is simply defined here as that depiction of the soldier’s continuing and deepening sense of tragedy and trauma in a military that has become overly technologized and irrationally bureaucratized, an outgrowth of the modern condition. In a broad sense, therefore, the modern period began at the time where mathematics replaced metaphor and fact replaced romance and mythology.

There have been several major studies about the impact of the Civil War on American literature that influences this study here,such as Craig A.Warren’s Scars to Prove It: The Civil War Soldier & American Literature, Michael W. Schaefer’s Just What War Is: The Civil War Writings of DeForest and Bierce, Daniel Aaron’s The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War, and Thomas C. Leonard’s Above the Battle: War-Making in America from Appomattox to Versailles. The most famous study is Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. What is most evident in these studies is how the Civil War dramatically altered the course of American literature up to the modern period.

By the time Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway began writing their World War II novels, The Naked and the Dead (1948) and Across the River and into the Trees (1950),where they make allusions to the Civil War, the impact that this war had on American literary sensibilities was very well evident. While their allusions to the American Civil War may be relatively slight in these novels, the implications about what this particular conflict might mean are much more significant than what the number of their words in the text may indicate. In alluding to the Civil War, both Mailer and Hemingway, who continually demonstrated a broad and complex view of history throughout their careers, perpetuate the residual influence of this particular war, and the soldiers who fought, on American literature. Hemingway and Mailer, therefore, are important writers to study because while they have so much in common, they also have significant differences in both style and literary vision, especially in the way they allude to the Civil War and quite possibly in their distinct attitudes about this war and war in general.

The tragedy and trauma that the war initiated throughout American history has a simple cause: Not only does this war remain the most calamitous conflict in US history; the Civil War also was the first to involve common citizens as drafted soldiers on a massive scale. The Civil War created more

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domestic grief than both World War I and World War II and all the other wars combined, and the impact of this experience was enough to make for a major turn or trope in American literature. Both Mailer and Hemingway understood this level of trauma. More important, both writers understood the Hegelian dialectical dimensions of how military history, and the psychological and micro-machinations of those in power, are manifested in the outcomes of their actions. For example,while the astronomical casualty rates during the spring and summer of 1864 were the direct results of the Richmond and Atlanta campaigns by Grant and Sherman and by Lee’s and the Confederate’s defense of them, the indirect causes resided in the psyche of the commanding generals and their resulting actions.In other words, Grant and Lee’s personalities drove the war and the war’s consequences drove the trauma.

In Hemingway’s writing, his historical perspective of the Civil War is most pronounced. Throughout his life, Hemingway was a student of military history. Moreover, both his grandfathers were participants in the Civil War. His paternal great uncles George and Rodney and his grandfather Anson participated in the Civil War by joining various volunteer Illinois units, the Eighteenth Illinois Infantry and the Chicago Board of Trade regiment. Anson was the only Hemingway brother to survive the war (Nagel 8–9). Hemingway’s maternal grandfather Hall also served in some capacity during the Civil War, but his experience does not seem to be as direct as Hemingway’s had been. In Hemingway’s library, he possessed several classics of Civil War history, including the Bruce Catton histories.

The Civil War is alluded to in Across the River and into the Trees specifically and primarily in the title, which comes from the dying last words of General Stonewall Jackson: “Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees” (Robertson 753). This title sets the melancholic tone for the whole novel. Colonel, formerly General, Richard Cantwell is spending his last few days on earth alive in the town he loves the most in life,Venice, immediately after World War II. While Jackson’s are not the dying words of Cantwell, there is a symmetrical connection. Right before he dies from a final heart attack, Cantwell tells his driver, aptly named Jackson, “I am now going to get into the large back seat of this god-damned, over-sized luxurious automobile” (Hemingway 307). This very reductive, modern statement,lacking in the poetry of Stonewall Jackson’s last words, is to be expected since even the book’s title is itself a reductive paraphrase of the Civil War general’s

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famous last words. Eight decades after Jackson’s death at Chancellorsville, the residue of his ethos informs Hemingway’s 1950 novel. In fact, the novel’s title has a noticeable epitaphic quality to it, primarily because it lacks the sense of inclusive camaraderie implied in “Let us cross” and, more importantly, the title lacks the essential verb “rest.” The result of this modern paraphrase creates a strong sense of loneliness and despair. Rest is what Cantwell, the professional soldier, has needed the most in his later professional life, but, of course, a sense of rest seems still to be lacking even in his dying. This scarred up old soldier is going to die alone in the back seat of a Buick, an ignominious scene of abject modernity.

This contrast with Stonewall Jackson excruciatingly reveals the true timber of Richard Cantwell’s ignominious fate. Jackson’s biographer James I. Robertson, Jr., writes that

[d]eath removed [Jackson] from the scene at the apogee of a military fame enjoyed by no other Civil War figure. His passing at a high point in Confederate success was the ultimate offering for the Southern cause. Death at the hour of his most spectacular victory led to more poems of praise than did any other single event of the war. Jackson was the only officer to be pictured on Confederate currency, and his likeness graced the most expensive note issued in Richmond: a $500 bill. (ix)

No such fame became of Cantwell, who led a gallant and purposeful life in the service of his army. Much of this contrast rests in the fact that Civil War veterans had been highly revered in American culture a half century before World War I and later World War II. Although veterans from World War II have been more celebrated than veterans from the First World War, neither of them have been as mythologized as much as the Civil War veterans from both sides of the conflict.

While Mailer did not have the familial or cultural connections to the Civil War, he was similarly aware of the war’s historical importance in American culture. The Civil War is specially alluded to in The Naked and the Dead when Cummings reveals a public humiliation at West Point; he seemingly asks a question about Lee and Grant improperly. In this particular scene, Cummings is a maniacal rhetorician. In this case, Cummings is in the agonistic throes of a Socratic contest against his West Point instructor,

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rhetorically dueling over who was the better commander Lee or Grant during the Civil War. In this scene, Cummings asks this richly loaded question:

Sir (he gets permission to speak), is it fair to say that Lee was the better general than Grant? I know that their tactics don’t compare, but Grant had the knowledge of strategy. What good are tactics, sir, if the . . . larger mechanics of men and supplies are not developed properly, because the tactics are just the part of the whole? In this conception wasn’t Grant the greatest man because he tried to take into account the intangibles. He wasn’t much good at the buck-and-wing but he could think up the rest of the show. (The classroom roars.)

It has been a triple error. He has been contradictory, rebellious and facetious. (411–2)