To the Editors:
I rarely if ever read Bruce Bawer, but my attention has been called to a reference he makes to me in his essay-review of Peter Griffin’s Along With Youth (“Hemingway’s Prelude to Paris,” October, 1985). I have, he says, imprudently attempted to downplay the importance of war as a theme in Hemingway’s work—imprudently because “war is clearly at the center of all but one of the novels.”

Mr. Bawer has got me wrong. In an essay-review a few years ago of Hemingway’s Selected Letters, I did not deny the obvious truth that war loomed large in Hemingway’s literary imagination. And I did not focus, as Mr. Bawer implies, upon Hemingway’s novels.

At the heart of my essay was a demonstration that numerous critics, from Edmund Wilson to Philip Young to Mark Schorer, have interpreted “Big Two-Hearted River” as a story about a war-traumatized young man, Nick Adams, who is struggling to choke off horrifying memories of the battlefield. The experience that has given Nick “a touch of panic,” said Edmund Wilson, is “the wholesale slaughtering of human beings in which he has taken part.” Yet the fact is that not a single reference to World War Iappears in the story, and it is by no means clear, furthermore, that panic is the feeling that Nick is contending with. Hemingway’s allusion to the “needs” Nick feels he has put behind him upon entering the woods also bears no discernible relation to war trauma, nor