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E. Hemingway-The solitary hero and the adventures of modernism

Hemingway was a major American novelist and short story writer whose principal themes were

violence, machismo, and the nature of what is now called "male bonding." His renowned style, for his

firmly non-intellectual fiction, is characteried by understatement and terse dialogue.

The first thing to be remar!ed about Across the iver and into the Trees is that it is so

egregiously bad as to render all comment on it positively embarrassing to anyone who esteems

Hemingway as one of the more considerable prose artists of our time and as the author of some of the

finest short stories in the language. Hence the disappointment induced by this # wor! of his, a wor!manifestly composed in a state of distemper, if not actual demoraliation.

This novel reads li!e a parody by the author of his own manner$a parody so biting that it

virtually destroys the mi%ed social and literary legend of Hemingway that has now endured for nearly

three decades. &or it can be said that not since the days of 'ic!ens and later of (ar! Twain has a writer

of fiction in English succeeded in beguiling and captivating his readers to the e%tent that Hemingway

did) and his success had a *uality of ease and naturalness that was essentially e%hilarating. +n this #

boo!, however, the legend suffers irremediable damage. Here he really goes too far in the e%ploitation of

it, indulging himself in blatant self-pity and e*ually blatant conceit, with the result that certain faults of

personality, and the moral and intellectual immaturity which he was never able to overcome but which

heretofore, in the greater part of his creative wor!, he managed to sublimate with genuine artistry, now

come through as ruling elements, forcing the reader to react to Hemingway the man rather than toHemingway the artist. And the man in Hemingway$in his literary appearances at any rate$has nearly

always struc! one as the parasitical double of the artist in him.

hilip ahv, "Hemingway in the Early /01s" 2/03, in his The (yth and the owerhouse 24

5/ by hilip ahv) reprinted with the permission of &arrar, 6traus 7 8irou%, +nc.3, &arrar, 6traus,

5/, pp. 9-:.

;Hemingway< had become a legendary figure, a !ind of twentieth-century =ord >yron) and li!e

>yron, he had learned to play himself, his own best hero, with superb conviction. He was Hemingway

of the rugged outdoor grin and the hairy chest posing beside a marlin he had just landed or a lion he had

just shot) he was Taran Hemingway, crouching in the African bush with elephant gun at ready, >wana

Hemingway commanding his native bearers in terse 6wahili) he was ?ar @orrespondent Hemingway

writing a play in the Hotel &lorida in (adrid while thirty &ascist shells crashed through the roof) later on

he was Tas! &orce Hemingway swathed in ammunition belts and defending his post singlehanded

against fierce 8erman attac!s.

ohn ?. Aldridge, "HemingwayB Cightmare and the @orrelative of =oss," in his After the =ost

8eneration, (c8raw-Hill, /.

Hemingway1s first and best two novels ;The 6un Also ises and A &arewell to Arms< were #

primarily descriptions of a society that had lost the possibility of belief. They were dominated by an

atmosphere of 8othic ruin, boredom, sterility, and decay. Det if they had been nothing more than

descriptions, they would inevitably have been as empty of meaning as the thing they were describing.

?hat saved them as novels was the values which Hemingway was able to salvage out of the ruin of his

characters and transform, through the medium of style and tone, into a !ind of moral networ! that lin!edthem together in a unified pattern of meaning. The famous code of forbearance, primitive loyalty, and

silent suffering, which was the direct product of the disappearance of all traditional codes, was a weapon

that served for a little while to protect Hemingway1s characters from the worst conse*uences of a life

without meaning. +t also served to protect Hemingway himself from the worst conse*uences of writing

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about that life) for the unceasing conflict between the code and the life created the dramatic tension that

lifted his wor! above mere reportage and gave it the stature of art.

ohn ?. Aldridge, "The Doung ?riter in AmericaB /F/," in his After the =ost

8eneration, (c8raw-Hill, /.

+n The Gld (an and the 6ea the artist in ;Hemingway< appears to have recouped some of his

losses, curbing the overassertive ego so easily disposed to fall into a !ind of morbid irritability of self-

love mi%ed with self-pity#.

>ut free as this # wor! is of the faults of the preceding one, it is still by no means the

masterpiece which the nationwide publicity set off by its publication in =ife magaine has made it out to

be. ublicity is the reward as well as the nemesis of celebrities, but it has nothing in common with

judgment. Though the merit of this new story is incontestable, so are its limitations. + do not believe that

it will eventually be placed among Hemingway1s major writings.

(oreover, it is in no sense a novel, as the publishers would have us believe. At its core it is

actually little more than a fishing anecdote, though one invested with an heroic appeal by the writer1s art,

which here again confirms its natural affinity with the theme of combat and virile sports. This art is at its

best in the supple and e%act rendering of the sensory detail called for by its chosen theme) and in telling

of the old fisherman1s ordeal on the open sea$of his strenuous encounter with a giant marlin, the

capture of him after a two-day struggle, and the loss of the carcass to the shar!s in the end$Hemingway

ma!es the most of his gifts, turning to good account the values of courage and endurance and disciplinein action on which his ethic as an artist depends#.

;Gne< is still left with the impression that the creative appeal of this narrative is forceful yet

restricted, its *uality of emotion genuine but so elemental in its totality as to e%act nothing from us

beyond instant assent. +t e%hibits the credentials of the authentic, but in itself it promises very little by

way of an advance beyond the positions already won in the earlier phases of Hemingway1s career. To be

sure, if one is to judge by what some of the reviewers have been saying and by the tal! heard among

literary people, the meaning of The Gld (an and the 6ea is to be sought in its deep symbolism. +t may

be that the symbolism is really there, though + for one have been unable to locate it.

>y a great effort ;Hemingway< became master of the magic style, soon to be imitated and

cheapened far and wide. >ut, unli!e Deats in a similar situation, he could not draw on fresh life-giving

resources of the spirit, nourishment from responsibility itself, from broadening e%perience) he wasincapable of any great further effort. 6o the style, in the old sinister magical fashion, mastered him. +t

too! him away from a whole continent of life, his own people, his own maturity as a novelist, and sent

him to 6pain, to Africa, anywhere, in search of more violence, more death. There was no farewell to

arms, no separate peace. ?here before he had discovered the effects to e%press the situation, a situation

perhaps demanded by some bitter wound in the soul, now themes were chosen just because they enabled

him to use the effects again. True, many of the short stories he wrote during these years have been

highly praised, and of course they are written with great s!ill) but not only do they fail to show any signs

of a major novelist arriving at his maturity, they suggest that something false, false to life and to art, is

creeping in, a touch of cynical swagger, a hint of bogus profundity, as if he is now unconsciously

beginning to parody himself. He is genuinely attracted to 6pain, a land of hard obstinate men and

haunted by death) the test of lonely courage fascinates him) but while he himself is being brave all overthe place, he is refusing the one courageous act demanded of him by his life in art$and he created

himself out of literature as an art$and that is, to settle down in or near any American city, ta!e it in all

over again, sin! down some shafts, if necessary find a new manner and forge a new style, and then write

the great American novels of his maturity.

. >. riestley, in his =iterature and ?estern (an 2copyright 4 50 by . >. riestley)

reprinted by permission of A. '. eters and @ompany3, Harper, 50, pp. 9/-95.

Hemingway never wrote a boo! set in the (ountain ?est, but he wrote none in which

innocence and nobility, heroism and cowardice, devotion and passion 2not love but aficion3 are not

defined as they are in the T.. ?esterns which beguile a nation. The ?est he e%ploited is the ?est not of

geography but of our dearest and most vulnerable dreams, not a locale but a fantasy, whose meanings do

not change when it is called 6pain or Africa or @uba. As long as the hunting and fishing is good. And thewomen can be left behind. +n 8ary @ooper, all at which Hemingway merely hinted was made e%plicit)

for @ooper was what Hemingway only longed to be, the ?est made flesh$his face, in its inarticulate

blan!ness, a living e*uivalent of Hemingway1s prose style#.

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Gnly a comic view could have been truer to our times, and this Hemingway notoriously lac!s.

He never !new how funny the ?esterner had come to seem in our world, whether played by oy ogers

or @ooper or Hemingway himself$only how sad. Gf all his male leads, a!e >arnes comes closest to

being redeemed from self-pity by humor$the humor implicit in his comic wound. And conse*uently

a!e could no more have been played by @ooper than could the Cic! Adams of the earliest stories, or the

old men of the last boo!s. Cever *uite young, @ooper was not permitted to grow really old$only to

betray his age and suffering through the noncommital (ontana mas!. He represents ideally the

protagonists of Hemingway1s middle novels, =ieutenant Henry and, of course, ordan) but he will not do

for anything in To Have and Have Cot, a 'epression boo! and, therefore, an ill-conceived sport

sufficient unto Humphrey >ogart. The roles on either side of middle age, Hemingway was able to play

himself, off the screen yet in the public eyeB the beautiful young man of up to twenty-three with his two

hundred and thirty-seven wounds, the old stud with his splendid beard and his guns chased in silver. ?e

cannot even remember the face of his middle years 2e%cept as represented by @ooper3, only the old-

fashioned photographs of the youth who became the "apa" of cover-stories in =oo! and =ifeB his own

doomed father, his own remotest ancestor as well as ours.

=eslie &iedler, "An Almost +maginary +nterviewB Hemingway in Ietchum," in artisan eview

2copyright 4 5J by artisan eview, +nc.3, 6ummer, 5J.

Gf all the writers who began to print after the &irst ?orld ?ar, Hemingway seems best to have

captured the tone of human malaise in an era of war and revolution) yet it is noteworthy that, whiledoing so, he rarely attempted a frontal or sustained representation of life in the Knited 6tates, for he

seems always to have understood that common e%perience was not within his reach. >y evo!ing the

"essence" of the modern e%perience through fables of violence that had their settings in Africa and

Europe, Hemingway touched the imagination of American readers whose lives, for all their apparent

ordinariness, were also mar!ed by the desperation which would become his literary signature and which

is, indeed, central to all "modernist" writing. These readers, in turn, often tried to endow their lives with

meaning and value by copying the gestures of defiance, the devotion to clenched styles of survival,

which they found in Hemingway1s wor!. >ecause he had penetrated so deeply to the true dilemmas of

the age, Hemingway soon began to influence its e%perience$not for the first time, life came to imitate

art#.

There emerges # the characteristic hero of the Hemingway worldB the hero who is woundedbut bears his wound in silence, who is sensitive but scorns to devalue his feelings into words, who is

defeated but finds a remnant of dignity in an honest confrontation of defeat. +n almost all of

Hemingway1s boo!s there is a tacit assumption that the deracination of our life is so e%treme, everyone

must find a psychic shelter of his own, a place in which to ma!e a last stand.

>ut noteB to ma!e a last stand$for if defeat is accepted in Hemingway1s world, humiliation and

rout are not. His fictions present moments of violence, crisis and death, yet these become occasions for a

stubborn, *ui%otic resistance through which the human capacity for satisfying its self-defined

obligations is both asserted and tested. "8race under pressure"B this becomes the ideal stance, the hoped-

for moral style, of Hemingway1s characters#.

;The Hemingway code involves the< determination to be faithful to one1s own e%perience, not

to fa!e emotions or pretend to sentiments that are not there) the belief that loyalty to one1s few friendsmatters more than the claims and dogmas of the world) the insistence upon avoiding self-pity and public

displays) the assumption that the most precious feelings cannot be articulated and that if the attempt is

made they turn "rotten") the desire to salvage from the collapse of social life a version of stoicism that

can ma!e suffering bearable) the hope that in direct physical sensation, the cold water of the cree! in

which one fishes or the purity of the wine made by 6panish peasants, there will be found an e%perience

that can resist corruption#.

Hemingway was always a young writer, and always a writer for the young. He published his

best novel The 6un Also ises in his mid-twenties and completed most of his great stories by the age of

forty. He started a campaign of terror against the fi%ed vocabulary of literature, a purge of style and

pomp, and in the name of naturalness he modelled a new artifice for tension. He struc! past the barriers

of culture and seemed to disregard the reticence of civilied relationships. He wrote for the nerves#.Hemingway was not so foolish as to suppose that fear can finally be overcomeB all his best

stories, from "&ifty 8rand" to "The 6hort Happy =ife of &rancis (acomber" are concerned to improvise

a momentary truce in the hopeless encounter with fear. >ut Hemingway touched upon something

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deeper, something that bro!e forth in his fiction as the most personal and lonely !ind of e%perience but

was formed by the pressures of J0th @entury history. His great subject was panic, the panic that follows

upon the dissolution of nihilism into the blood-stream of consciousness, the panic that finds unbearable

the thought of the ne%t minute and its succession by the minute after that. ?e all !now this e%perience,

even if, unli!e a!e >arnes, we can sleep at nightB we !now it because it is part of modern life, perhaps

of any life, but also because Hemingway drove it into our awareness#.

A code pressing so painfully on the nervous system and so constricted to symbolic

gratifications is almost certain to brea! down$indeed, in his best wor! Hemingway often shows that it

does. After a time, however, his devotion to this code yields him fewer and fewer psychic returns, since

it is in the nature of the *uest for a moral style that the very act of approaching or even finding it sets off

a series of discoveries as to its radical limitations. As a result the later Hemingway, in his apparent

satisfaction with the moral style he has improvised, begins to imitate and caricature himselfB the manner

becomes that of the tight-lipped tough guy, and the once taut and frugal prose turns corpulent.

+rving Howe, in his A ?orld (ore AttractiveB A iew of (odern =iterature and olitics 24

59) reprinted by permission of the publisher, Horion ress, Cew Dor!3, Horion, 59, pp. 5/-L0.

Hemingway # made the one technical advance that could still be recogniable as an advance.

He gave the illusion of having purified the method of poetry, as Ilee the method of painting, or

irandello the method of the theater. >ut it was never more than an illusion.

ohn ?ain, "The @onflict of &orms in @ontemporary English =iterature," in his Essays on=iterature and +deas 2reprinted by permission of (acmillan, =ondon and >asingsto!e3, 6t. (artin1s,

59.

;+t< is apparently through boo!s that Hemingway learned to write Hemingway-ese$through

the eye rather than the ear. +f his language is collo*uial, it is written collo*uial) for he was

constitutionally incapable of hearing English as it was spo!en around him. To a critic who once as!ed

him why his characters all spo!e ali!e, Hemingway answered, ">ecause + never listen to anybody."

E%cept, one imagines, to himself, to his own monologues, held, drun!, or sober, over a boo! or before a

mirror, in the loneliness of his own head. He was, of all eminent writers, the most nearly inarticulate$

garrulous, when garrulous at all, li!e the friendly drun! who claims your ear and at great length

manages to say nothing. To the end of his life, "articulate" was to Hemingway a curse word, an epithet

applied with mingled admiration and contempt to certain rival writers. And yet he, who spo!e withdifficulty, and surely wrote with more, managed to invent, without betraying his inarticulateness, one of

the most imitated prose styles of all time#.

That he loved nothingness more than being, death more than his own life, and failure more than

success, is the glory of the early Hemingway, which is to say, of the best Hemingway. His authentic

wor! has a single subjectB the flirtation with death, the approach to the void. And this subject he

managed to treat in a !ind of language which betrays neither the bitterness of death nor the terror of the

void#.

+n The Gld (an and the 6ea, trying to recapture the spare horror of his early wor!, he produced

only an echo, a not-*uite-convincing counterfeit of his best.

=eslie A. &iedler, "The 'eath of the Gld (en," in his ?aiting for the End 2copyright 4 5 by

=eslie A. &iedler) reprinted by permission of 6tein and 'ayMublishers3, 6tein 7 'ay, 5, pp. -.+n the best of the early Hemingway it always seemed that if e%actly the right words in e%actly

the right order were not chosen, something monstrous would occur, an unimaginably delicate internal

warning system would be thrown out of adjustment, and some principle of personal and artistic integrity

would be fatally compromised. >ut by the time he came to write The Gld (an ;and the 6ea< there seems

to have been nothing at sta!e e%cept the professional obligation to sound as much li!e Hemingway as

possible.