Now, I must say it’s true: you haven’t known frustration until you’ve been an English degree holder working wage jobs that don’t require a high school diploma. Still, at many instances in life, I can look back with pride at my academic exposure to literary study, and the novel is still a format I appreciate and enjoy on a regular basis. Some of my favorite authors are D.H. Lawrence, Henry James and Milan Kundera, and even to extrapolate, certain amusing quirks about European people have made themselves apparent by way of the craft, like the French eating omelettes for lunch like it’s their job (Maugham’s Of Human Bondage), the Spanish not talking at all during meals (Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls) and the British holding “genius” as an element, of varying prominence, theoretically present in all men (something by Austen… maybe Sense and Sensibility… don’t quote me on it).
Well, I suppose it’s my job to get all philosophical here. Anyway, sitting here, on Memorial Day in America 2026, a beautiful, sunny day, I feel how all of our lives involve little wars to be fought, every day, I FEEL the high-stakes, high-emotional madness pervading the community. We are a cruel species, by trade, with a long history of confrontation, gore and bloodletting.
So if it’s true that all the best authors did fight in wars — Hemingway, Vonnegut, Salinger, Celine — this inherent aspect of conflict in human existence might make this whole thing a little easier to swallow.
Hemingway and Celine chose to write often, and copiously, about military skirmishes, whereas Vonnegut and Salinger treated it more sparingly, and, typically, with more of a sense of humor. The “For Esme–with Love and Squalor” selection from Salinger’s Nine Stories collection is about the only military piece in his works I can think of off the top of my head, an adorable tale of a young girl meeting a soldier, befriending him and then requesting an ensuing story full of “love and squalor.” Vonnegut sub-titles Slaughterhouse-Five as “The Children’s Crusade,” as a respectful acknowledgement of some woman’s frenetic rant about the soldiers having been nothing but “children” upon military action.
Whatever triggers this difference in methods for handling military themes, one common thread undoubtedly demarcates these ex-pat literary contributors: an undeniable clarity and sense of purpose in their writing. And I don’t want to name names, but let’s just say we’re less prone to the maritime ornate, here, than with a certain other “classic.” Vonnegut declaims “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time”; Hemingway refers to “the weak man with the sad face”; Celine quips “Nothing is as scary as having a soft body surrounded by hard, lethal objects”; Salinger emits “I swear to God I’m a lunatic.” I mean, the writing just sticks to your ribs — it comes across as a person talking, and in an urgent fashion, rather than a case of a writer making literary posturing or attempting to do “professional” work. You all know I wouldn’t heap that on you, especially not on Memorial Day.