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                            FIREARMS IN THE WORKS OF 
                             HEMINGWAY AND MAILER 
                                
                                 BARRY H. LEEDS

BY NOW IT IS MOUTHING A TRUISM TO POINT OUT THAT FIREARMS have played an iconic role in American history. Starting with this axiomatic assumption, one finds that guns are virtually ubiquitous in the works of those two peculiarly American authors, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer. Sometimes mere accoutrements or plot devices, they are more often significant thematically and symbolically.

Occasionally, serendipitous connections between the two authors present themselves. The best example of these may be the case of the 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. At the outset of A Farewell to Arms (1929), Hemingway describes how

the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child. (4)

This crucial passage foreshadows the thematic connection of rain, pregnancy, war and death in the novel, notably that of Catherine Barkley, which makes Farewell so clearly a naturalistic work.

The 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano, standard issue for the Italian army throughout the first half of the twentieth century, was subsequently sold cheaply in large numbersthrough mail-order houses worldwide.One of these rifles, equipped with a 4-power scope, was ordered by Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963, forty-five years after the 1918 setting of Hemingway’s Farewell, and used to assassinate John F. Kennedy, as elaborated upon in Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (1995). This death of monumental, tragic proportions was brought about by the use of a $10 gun. Also in A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry feels faintly ridiculous in obeying the regulation that a uniformed officer be armed with a pistol even when out of combat (148).Yet after his convalescence in Milan he uses his pistol (of unspecified caliber, but described as “regulation”) during the next campaign to shoot one of two sergeants for disobedience and desertion (204). The point of the passage, one of many emphasizing the anti-heroic message of the novel, is that Henry and the enlisted man Bonello (who administers the coup de grâce) are so inured to death in war that they are entirely dispassionate about it.

Most clearly parallel to this scene is the opening of An American Dream (1965) in which Stephen Richards Rojack kills four German machine-gunners with his .30 caliber M1 carbine. Portentously set under a full moon, the episode illustrates Rojack’s capacity for lethal violence and his perception that murder has a sexual aspect to it (Mailer, American 3-6). Yet, in a later passage in the New England woods with his wife Deborah, he is shamed by her superior ability to hunt small animals with a .22 rifle, another of the scenes that illuminates the constant competition in their intense love/hate relationship: “And in fact she was an exceptional hunter. She had gone on safari with her first husband and killed a wounded lion charging ten feet from her throat, she dropped an Alaskan bear with two shots to the heart (30/06 Winchester)” (35).