The Ambulance Drivers - James McGrath Morris

Both John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway volunteered to be ambulance drivers during World War I. It was during that time they first met, briefly. If that meeting was unremarkable at the time, the circumstances of course had an outsize impact on both their lives, especially their writing.

Morris tracks both writers' lives, professionally and personally, and their friendship with each other. It isn't a deep dive, having read a lot of books on Hemingway over the last decade, it's obvious Morris is just skimming across the surface in places. But it gives an overall picture of their ups and downs, and how that affects things between them.

Although frankly, most of the effect is on Hemingway, who swings widely between praising Dos Passos and encouraging him to come along to Spain or Key West, and hurling invective at him and running him down anyone and everyone. Which is pretty much how Hemingway did all his friends over the course of his lifetime. Capable of great acts of kindness and cruelty. First envious of Dos Passos' literary success, while Hemingway was still struggling to find his first true success. Then, once he'd far surpassed Dos Passos in popularity and financial success, envious that Dos Passos was the one regarded as the writer of greater literary merit. The critical darling.

Morris spends a lot of time highlighting the two writers' differing philosophies and viewpoints, as expressed through their writing and their actions. That Dos Passos was active politically through the '20s and into the '30s. Joining in protest marches to demand the flimsily accused Sacco and Vanzetti not be executed. Visiting striking coal miners in Kentucky to write about their lives. Then he grew increasingly disenchanted with Communism once he, you know, saw what Stalin was doing with it. Whereas, until the mid-1930s, Hemingway tried to remain out of politics. And frankly, given how To Have and Have Not is one of his weaker efforts, he was better off leaving politics out of his books. Morris notes that Dos Passos wrote about war to try and convince humanity to stop it, while Hemingway wrote about what it was to experience it, to try and process its impact. Differing perspectives.

At times, Morris seems to rush through events, such as the murder of Dos Passos' friend Jose Robles during the Spanish Civil War. Even though that was a major nail in the coffin, one that almost ended contact between the two for over a decade. But, again, there are entire books out there on just that subject, so maybe it's unnecessary. You get a decent feel for the problem, at least, even if Dos Passos almost feels like a bystander in this book at times. Mostly because, as Morris focuses more and more on the disintegration of the friendship, Dos Passos isn't really involved in that. If he's envious of Hemingway's success, he's not letting it drive him to write poison pen articles in magazines, or rail against him in letters. The bitterness is one-sided, but that means the person who isn't retaliating plays a less prominent role.

I can't let the review pass without mentioning a passage late in the book involving William Faulkner, who when asked by a student, describes himself as second only to Thomas Wolfe among contemporary American writers (so humble!). Dos Passos is third, and then Hemingway, who Faulkner says has never used a word that might require a reader to open a dictionary. Because that's the most important thing when you write. But what would I expect from a writer who once had an entire chapter that consisted of the sentence, 'My mother is a fish'?

As I Lay Dying is a shit book, and I'm annoyed I was forced to read it in high school English, is what I'm trying to say here.

'Hemingway, unlike Dos Passos, worried less about war itself than coming to terms with it. War was personal for him, not political.'