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 characterized by understatement and terse dialogue.
The first thing to be remarked about Across the River 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 work of his, a work
manifestly composed in a state of distemper, if not actual demoralization.
This novel reads like a parody by the author of his own mannera parody so biting that it
virtually destroys the mixed social and literary legend of Hemingway that has now endured for nearly
three decades. For it can be said that not since the days of Dickens and later of Mark Twain has a writer
of fiction in English succeeded in beguiling and captivating his readers to the extent that Hemingway
did; and his success had a quality of ease and naturalness that was essentially exhilarating. In this
book, however, the legend suffers irremediable damage. Here he really goes too far in the exploitation of
it, indulging himself in blatant self-pity and equally 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 work, he managed to sublimate with genuine artistry, now
come through as ruling elements, forcing the reader to react to Hemingway the man rather than to
Hemingway the artist. And the man in Hemingwayin his literary appearances at any ratehas nearly
always struck one as the parasitical double of the artist in him.
Philip Rahv, "Hemingway in the Early 1950's" (1950), in his The Myth and the Powerhouse (
1965 by Philip Rahv; reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.), Farrar, Straus,
1965, pp. 193-98.
[Hemingway] had become a legendary figure, a kind of twentieth-century Lord Byron; and like
Byron, 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 Tarzan Hemingway, crouching in the African bush with elephant gun at ready, Bwana
Hemingway commanding his native bearers in terse Swahili; he was War Correspondent Hemingway
writing a play in the Hotel Florida in Madrid while thirty Fascist shells crashed through the roof; later on
he was Task Force Hemingway swathed in ammunition belts and defending his post singlehanded
against fierce German attacks.
John W. Aldridge, "Hemingway: Nightmare and the Correlative of Loss," in his After the Lost
Generation, McGraw-Hill, 1951.
Hemingway's first and best two novels [The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms] were
primarily descriptions of a society that had lost the possibility of belief. They were dominated by an
atmosphere of Gothic ruin, boredom, sterility, and decay. Yet if they had been nothing more than
descriptions, they would inevitably have been as empty of meaning as the thing they were describing.
What 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 kind of moral network that linked
them 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 Hemingway's characters from the worst consequences of a life
without meaning. It also served to protect Hemingway himself from the worst consequences of writing

about that life; for the unceasing conflict between the code and the life created the dramatic tension that
lifted his work above mere reportage and gave it the stature of art.
John W. Aldridge, "The Young Writer in America: 19451951," in his After the Lost
Generation, McGraw-Hill, 1951.
In The Old Man and the Sea the artist in [Hemingway] appears to have recouped some of his
losses, curbing the overassertive ego so easily disposed to fall into a kind of morbid irritability of selflove mixed with self-pity.
But free as this work 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 Life magazine has made it out to
be. Publicity 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. I do not believe that
it will eventually be placed among Hemingway's major writings.
Moreover, 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 writer's 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 exact rendering of the sensory detail called for by its chosen theme; and in telling
of the old fisherman's ordeal on the open seaof his strenuous encounter with a giant marlin, the
capture of him after a two-day struggle, and the loss of the carcass to the sharks in the endHemingway
makes the most of his gifts, turning to good account the values of courage and endurance and discipline
in action on which his ethic as an artist depends.
[One] is still left with the impression that the creative appeal of this narrative is forceful yet
restricted, its quality of emotion genuine but so elemental in its totality as to exact nothing from us
beyond instant assent. It exhibits 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 Hemingway's career. To be
sure, if one is to judge by what some of the reviewers have been saying and by the talk heard among
literary people, the meaning of The Old Man and the Sea is to be sought in its deep symbolism. It may
be that the symbolism is really there, though I for one have been unable to locate it.
By a great effort [Hemingway] became master of the magic style, soon to be imitated and
cheapened far and wide. But, unlike Yeats in a similar situation, he could not draw on fresh life-giving
resources of the spirit, nourishment from responsibility itself, from broadening experience; he was
incapable of any great further effort. So the style, in the old sinister magical fashion, mastered him. It
took him away from a whole continent of life, his own people, his own maturity as a novelist, and sent
him to Spain, to Africa, anywhere, in search of more violence, more death. There was no farewell to
arms, no separate peace. Where before he had discovered the effects to express 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 skill; 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 Spain, 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 over
the place, he is refusing the one courageous act demanded of him by his life in artand he created
himself out of literature as an artand that is, to settle down in or near any American city, take it in all
over again, sink down some shafts, if necessary find a new manner and forge a new style, and then write
the great American novels of his maturity.
J. B. Priestley, in his Literature and Western Man (copyright 1960 by J. B. Priestley;
reprinted by permission of A. D. Peters and Company), Harper, 1960, pp. 435-36.
Hemingway never wrote a book set in the Mountain West, but he wrote none in which
innocence and nobility, heroism and cowardice, devotion and passion (not love but aficion) are not
defined as they are in the T.V. Westerns which beguile a nation. The West he exploited is the West 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 Spain or Africa or Cuba. As long as the hunting and fishing is good. And the
women can be left behind. In Gary Cooper, all at which Hemingway merely hinted was made explicit;
for Cooper was what Hemingway only longed to be, the West made fleshhis face, in its inarticulate
blankness, a living equivalent of Hemingway's prose style.

Only a comic view could have been truer to our times, and this Hemingway notoriously lacks.
He never knew how funny the Westerner had come to seem in our world, whether played by Roy Rogers
or Cooper or Hemingway himselfonly how sad. Of all his male leads, Jake Barnes comes closest to
being redeemed from self-pity by humorthe humor implicit in his comic wound. And consequently
Jake could no more have been played by Cooper than could the Nick Adams of the earliest stories, or the
old men of the last books. Never quite young, Cooper was not permitted to grow really oldonly to
betray his age and suffering through the noncommital Montana mask. He represents ideally the
protagonists of Hemingway's middle novels, Lieutenant Henry and, of course, Jordan; but he will not do
for anything in To Have and Have Not, a Depression book and, therefore, an ill-conceived sport
sufficient unto Humphrey Bogart. The roles on either side of middle age, Hemingway was able to play
himself, off the screen yet in the public eye: 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. We
cannot even remember the face of his middle years (except as represented by Cooper), only the oldfashioned photographs of the youth who became the "Papa" of cover-stories in Look and Life: his own
doomed father, his own remotest ancestor as well as ours.
Leslie Fiedler, "An Almost Imaginary Interview: Hemingway in Ketchum," in Partisan Review
(copyright 1962 by Partisan Review, Inc.), Summer, 1962.
Of all the writers who began to print after the First World War, Hemingway seems best to have
captured the tone of human malaise in an era of war and revolution; yet it is noteworthy that, while
doing so, he rarely attempted a frontal or sustained representation of life in the United States, for he
seems always to have understood that common experience was not within his reach. By evoking the
"essence" of the modern experience 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 marked 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 Hemingway's work. Because he had penetrated so deeply to the true dilemmas of
the age, Hemingway soon began to influence its experiencenot for the first time, life came to imitate
art.
There emerges the characteristic hero of the Hemingway world: the hero who is wounded
but 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. In almost all of
Hemingway's books there is a tacit assumption that the deracination of our life is so extreme, everyone
must find a psychic shelter of his own, a place in which to make a last stand.
But note: to make a last standfor if defeat is accepted in Hemingway's world, humiliation and
rout are not. His fictions present moments of violence, crisis and death, yet these become occasions for a
stubborn, quixotic resistance through which the human capacity for satisfying its self-defined
obligations is both asserted and tested. "Grace under pressure": this becomes the ideal stance, the hopedfor moral style, of Hemingway's characters.
[The Hemingway code involves the] determination to be faithful to one's own experience, not
to fake emotions or pretend to sentiments that are not there; the belief that loyalty to one's few friends
matters 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 make suffering bearable; the hope that in direct physical sensation, the cold water of the creek in
which one fishes or the purity of the wine made by Spanish peasants, there will be found an experience
that can resist corruption.
Hemingway was always a young writer, and always a writer for the young. He published his
best novel The Sun Also Rises in his mid-twenties and completed most of his great stories by the age of
forty. He started a campaign of terror against the fixed vocabulary of literature, a purge of style and
pomp, and in the name of naturalness he modelled a new artifice for tension. He struck past the barriers
of culture and seemed to disregard the reticence of civilized relationships. He wrote for the nerves.
Hemingway was not so foolish as to suppose that fear can finally be overcome: all his best
stories, from "Fifty Grand" to "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" are concerned to improvise
a momentary truce in the hopeless encounter with fear. But Hemingway touched upon something

deeper, something that broke forth in his fiction as the most personal and lonely kind of experience but
was formed by the pressures of 20th Century 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 next minute and its succession by the minute after that. We all know this experience,
even if, unlike Jake Barnes, we can sleep at night: we know 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 break downindeed, in his best work 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 quest 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 himself: the manner
becomes that of the tight-lipped tough guy, and the once taut and frugal prose turns corpulent.
Irving Howe, in his A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literature and Politics (
1963; reprinted by permission of the publisher, Horizon Press, New York), Horizon, 1963, pp. 65-70.
Hemingway made the one technical advance that could still be recognizable as an advance.
He gave the illusion of having purified the method of poetry, as Klee the method of painting, or
Pirandello the method of the theater. But it was never more than an illusion.
John Wain, "The Conflict of Forms in Contemporary English Literature," in his Essays on
Literature and Ideas (reprinted by permission of Macmillan, London and Basingstoke), St. Martin's,
1963.
[It] is apparently through books that Hemingway learned to write Hemingway-esethrough
the eye rather than the ear. If his language is colloquial, it is written colloquial; for he was
constitutionally incapable of hearing English as it was spoken around him. To a critic who once asked
him why his characters all spoke alike, Hemingway answered, "Because I never listen to anybody."
Except, one imagines, to himself, to his own monologues, held, drunk, or sober, over a book 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, like the friendly drunk 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 spoke with
difficulty, 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
work has a single subject: the flirtation with death, the approach to the void. And this subject he
managed to treat in a kind of language which betrays neither the bitterness of death nor the terror of the
void.
In The Old Man and the Sea, trying to recapture the spare horror of his early work, he produced
only an echo, a not-quite-convincing counterfeit of his best.
Leslie A. Fiedler, "The Death of the Old Men," in his Waiting for the End (copyright 1964 by
Leslie A. Fiedler; reprinted by permission of Stein and Day/Publishers), Stein & Day, 1964, pp. 9-19.
In the best of the early Hemingway it always seemed that if exactly the right words in exactly
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. But by the time he came to write The Old Man [and the Sea] there seems
to have been nothing at stake except the professional obligation to sound as much like Hemingway as
possible.