Spectator's Journal/Failure by Design
Hart, Jeffrey
cern that Fussell's portrait of the artist as ex-GI is more than a tad overdrawn and smacks of self-dramatization. But it's precisely his flair for such brash insight, for the dazzling connection,...
...The description of Renata echoes Jake Barnes on Lady Brett: she is like a "racing shell...
...The last and longest piece in this collection, "My War," is also the best, and it points up the trouble with even the most brilliant of the others -namely, the infantryman's "disguise...
...Even when it comes to more sacred literary fare-like Waugh, Maugham, and James Boswell-Fussell's slant is off-center and mischievous, and a far cry from explication de text...
...Robert Cantwell was a Communist and a writer widely regarded as promising...
...Army in World War II in Europe, and that, too, is presented as a bureaucratic mess...
...Our college program is based on the Humanities as discerned in the great books of Western civilization and as seen through the eyes of the Christian humanist...
...Colonel Cantwell's military career is susceptible of being read as an analogue of Hemingway's artistic career...
...They share the convention of shameless self-satisfaction...
...and e.arnples path se-ors and gnlryeaetedl are e-,tcrs very used by the aUrhor wi-o stresses the importance of logic in our everyday byes He show, ~5 how 10 huh :IC a,II and conc ue IT aid makes UL Pn1Oe the process E.erc:ses to test cur aO,I:iy boreal: n dearly are pro'-ded .h'Oug^out 1' S IprCvokI rq took "-uSrrafed $9.95 plus 51.25 handling Math Without Tears THE GREAT UNIVERSITIES provided the ground for the important political leaders, philosophers, theologians, scientists, lawyers, poets, and religious of the past...
...He echoes the rhythms of Death in the Afternoon, the magnificent concluding elegy, when he has Colonel Cantwell think about his own death and burial: "I'd like to be buried way out at the edge of the grounds, but in sight of the old graceful house and the tall, great trees...
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...Poe, too, it seems, has "an urge toward the outre"-a phrase not unbefitting Fussell himself, who seems to create authors in his own image...
...The description of the landscape powerfully compares past and present: It looks quite differently now he thought...
...Benito at 100 by John Lukacs The State of America's Newspapers by Matthew Stevenson 1n1nF using non-technical language and k liQht touch Roy Hartkopl glees you 1 aasre understanding of many everyday applications at mathemelIls lie lakes the reader from sImpy Counting to Trigonometry and calculus...
...In one of the most remarkable scenes of Across the River and into the Trees, the Colonel returns to the scene and tries to exorcise the demons of that wound, and also explicates the meaning of the 1918 wound for Hemingway's fiction...
...It is silly of the narrator to say-though the narrator here no doubt takes the Colonel's viewpoint-that Cantwell by Jeffrey Hart sits in a hotel dining room with "his flanks covered...
...Its subject is failure...
...All of this was thoroughly familiar to Hemingway...
...Each constitutes a little arena of a very twentieth century sort of insecure egotism and self-concern, and a critic would be hard pressed to decide which bespeaks the more pitiable dependence on external shows of esteem...
...There is Colonel-Cantwell's failure...
...Then, too, the roads are better now and there is no dust...
...Like Orwell, he revels in the tell-tale signs of class structure and social status...
...I certainly looked for plenty of ditches...
...E...
...In the central moment of A Farewell to Arms, Lt...
...Nineteen-eighteen is the key year, making the fictional world and generating the emotions of the early work...
...He defecates on the spot, buries a ten-thousand lira note in the ground, and spits in the river...
...But Across the River and into the Trees at the same time enacts its distance from those earlier sources of power...
...The old soldier finds the grassed-over spot and performs a peculiar but haunting ritual...
...On the loss of the regiment, Cantwell pleads bad orders, a touch 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983 worth thinking about...
...these references in a collage-like way, much as Picasso would juxtapose an old newspaper, a pipe, a glass, a piece of a violin...
...It deploys Jeffrey Hart is Professor ofEnglish at Dartmouth College and a contributing editor of National Review...
...Yet before we can assess it, we must actually see it...
...That is the central subject of Across the River and into the Trees, which, though not a major Hemingway novel and certainly seriously flawed, also knows it, and tells us why...
...Fussell climb such molehills and turn them into mountains "because they are there"-or is it because no card-carrying critic of somber mien ever has...
...But he is nevertheless out of action as a soldier, and we may also think that like the colonel Hemingway by 1950 has lost those two stars as a major novelist...
...This time it is Gabriele D'Annunzio, who is presented as a phoney...
...But it's precisely his flair for such brash insight, for the dazzling connection, that marks the 34 pieces in this book and proves him to be a gifted critic and more than a gardenvariety gadfly...
...It is silly to hear the narrator say that the Colonel "reaches accurately and well for the champagne bucket with the ice...
...If only he'd let the old soldier fade away...
...His secretary, Juanita Jensen, recalls that in 1949 in Havana Hemingway had on his bookshelf a biography of Hawthorne by Robert Cantwell...
...Is it (as he claims) a merger of literary and social commentary, or rather a coy flouting of both, when he divines a link between two modern-day "prose genres"classified "personal" ads and protest letters by authors aggrieved by bad reviews: "They are not as distinct generically as one might imagine at first glance...
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...This narrative voice draws perilously close to what would be in character for the battered and mentally scarred colonel...
...Cantwell's career as a novelist came to an unforeseen end, though he later became a successful journalist and a writer for Sports Illustrated...
...It is a kind of collage, consciously making reference to the whole range of the earlier work, acknowledging the real sources of Hemingway's early power, but bidding them a conscious and highly literary farewell...
...cross the River and into the Trees constantly invites us to consider the earlier Hemingway...
...Her a I s a Clears imp III written basic g urde to lc Ical thinking, showing how to spot the iaBacie s, the peel udices an a empt t Oil a I I s m. the inappropriate analogies- etc . In the - of he r hllor s argument And how lo watcrl tar and avoid the Irrational in your own ledgmenls The author makes plain not neey Mar out a ISO wee/ people resist Iac Ing the lrurh A tool foe afar IYnaiap a5 well as toerlnctaF ethers 99.95 plus $1 25 hAnd I rig THE ART OF AIOUVIENT by Giles St Aubrn LEARNING TO THINK By E- R. Emmett 1^•5 tO'.C eat ^g a"d rca!JCIV rook st•urrs you haw IO ach,e'e the -os[ Laa c god of educal'on LEARNING TO THINK Pj,lies d•agrar...
...Colonel Cantwell, like Lt...
...The name Cantwell suggests to any reader the colonel's considerable capacity for conversational hot air, but the name also belonged to an unsuccessful novelist of the 1930s...
...perambulating shopping malls in their bright, very tight jersey trousers...
...But the claim to kinship ends there...
...Inside that gruff exterior might be a largely gruff interior...
...There is the "terrible truth" that Graham Greene cannot write English and there is Nabokov's "constant pursuit of the outrd...
...Hemingway once remarked that the novel is about the command-level performance of the U.S...
...A serious moment in cultural history," he says, "occurred a few years ago when gasoline trucks changed-the warning word on the rear from Inflammable to Flammable...
...The only times I used to ride through it was in a camion...
...There was the Hawthorne, which I liked very much, but there wasn't any fiction...
...We get echoes of the "good place" of "Big Two-Hearted River...
...In Across the River and into the Trees the energy is in the past and can be recaptured only fitfully, by returning in memory to his special fictional territory: "He took two mannitol hexanitrate tablets...
...He, after all, had tried his hand at a proletarian novel in To Have and Have Not...
...What all of this means, I suppose, is that the Colonel is the psychological owner of this piece of earth, but is saying goodbye to it, for, as this novel explains, it was here that Frederic Henry-Richard Cantwell lost his sense of immortality...
...Hemingway redoes the ancient Count Greffi: the Contessa Dandolo "is over eighty, and she is as gay as a girl and does not have any fear of dying...
...Peter V. Sampo Thomas More Institute of Liberal Arts One Manchester Street Merrimack, NH 03054 Please send me information about this program...
...And it's the measure of his quirky sensibility that his chief interests-books, manners, war, and travel-are so often viewed from the acute angle of out-of-the-way if not downright frivolous texts: The Boy Scout Handbook, for example, whose ninth edition he subjects to a book review, and then there are black-andwhite photos from Life magazine, a censor's guide to taboo novels in South Africa, and even some cookietin lids from a bakery in Georgia, which provide quaint fodder for a study in historical revisionism: Does Mr...
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...He has lost his regiment in battle and lost his general's stars...
...The rest of the times we walked...
...I stole that, he thought...
...He is by far the snootier, has notably less moral vision, and is less at home with tenderness...
...since he had always been able to spit since 1918, he could take them dry...
...FAILURE BY DESIGN When Ernest Hemingway's Across the River and into the Trees appeared in 1950, it was greeted with hoots of scorn by the critics...
...You were the best bet I had in American fiction and I wish the Christ you would write it . . ." If Across the River and into the Trees can be read as a retrospective collage of Hemingway's career, then Colonel Cantwell's military failure and Robert Cantwell's artistic failure may comment on Hemingway...
...She dyes her hair red and it looks very well...
...Not just obesity but the flaunting of obesity is the Prole sign, as if the object were to give maximum aesthetic offense to the higher classes and thus achieve a form of revenge...
...Recounting his grim first hours of combat in Alsace, France, Fussell finally remembers (instead of simply acting out) emotions for which the term "pissed-off" is apparently just a frail euphemism...
...In August 1950, shortly before Across the River and into the Trees was published, Hemingway heard from Robert Cantwell, for he replied in a letter from La Finca Vigia that began: "Dear Bob: It was strange to hear from you after so long...
...It is highly amusing stuff but it all starts to sound like gossip-mongering in a smooth doctoral tongue...
...Everything is much smaller when you are older...
...S P E C T A T O R' S J O U R N A L...
...I suppose it is because the distances are all changed...
...It's as if erudition, which Fussell has in spades, were a license to entertain whatever the cost...
...Given a grant engineered by Lincoln Steffens to write a novel about the San Francisco_ labor leader Harry Bridges, Cantwell found that his artistic perceptions and his ideology were incompatible...
...Indeed, he did, or, rather, consciously echoes it...
...The leaves had fallen early, that year, and been swept up long ago...
...He _has lied...
...Frederic Henry of A Farewell to Arms, had been a lieutenant in the Italian army 'and fought against the Austrians in World War I. On his final trip to Venice, the Colonel crosses a bridge over the Tagliamento river, into which Frederic Henry dove to escape execution and make his separate peace...
...I suppose what I looked for then, was patches of shade when we fell out, and wells in farm yards...
...Public education had apparently produced a population which no longer knew In- as an intensifier...
...That is, he sits at a corner table, presumably so that he cannot be joined by or sit next to bores...
...I have worried about you and waited for books...
...The projected heroes seemed really to be the villains...
...Dept .998•G...
...If only he would quit acting as if he wanted to donate his wit to the Smithsonian...
...emphasnzIng Ihit pract,C21 aspnetsel math Humorous=not tears wall In ii...
...But the heady candor and precision of this final, in all ways climactic essay suggest that almost everything else is indeed just so much high-grade fluff by a man who knows better and can't help it...
...What we get, instead, is a gallery of clowns, cads, and loons and their dark comic- frailties, with criticism just a front for the juicier stuff of caricature and psychobiography: the "neurotic" temper of Waugh's col lected letters, the "positively Hearstlike chutzpah" of Maugham, Boswell's life as "one of the most memorable satyrs of all time...
...Read correctly, it is an unusual work, and a graceful elegy on a major talent, full of wonderful autumnal touches...
...From the perspective of 1950, in Across the River and into the Trees, Ernest Hemingway, Colonel Cantwell, and the failed novelist Robert Cantwell tend to merge in this literary collage...
...I don't think it would be much of a nuisance to them...
...Much too often the narrative voice says stupid or irrelevant things: "Then she chewed well and solidly on her steak...
...We return to Hemingway's obsessive "bend of the river" where HenryCantwell had been hit...
...There is, moreover, a prissiness here vaguely reminiscent of Gore Vidal, but Fussell's only avowed mentor is George Orwell...
...And he is failing physically...
...Then he was pulling open the door of Harry's bar and was inside and he had made it again, and was at home...
...11 How to Argue and Win...
...too, he thought...
...Across the River and into the Trees redoes the famous scene in A Farewell to Arms in which patriotic oratory is heard indistinctly at a distance...
...If Across the River and into the Trees is viewed in relation to Hemingway's previous fiction it can be seen as a poignant and highly self-conscious analytic act...
...After the extraordinary achievement of the Twenties, Hemingway's performance as an artist during the Thirties became uncertain and uneven...
...And ditches...
...And Orwell, while ironic, is always serious-Fussell's irony can't decide how serious it is or what it wants to do when it grows up: obesity, he states, is four times more visible among the lower class, "as any observer can testify who has witnessed Prole women...
...Thus Cantwell has gone all the way back to the beginning, beyond Frederic Henry to Nick Adams, the boy who, in "Indian Camp," felt quite sure that he would never die, but learns differently from his war wound...
...Henry is badly wounded at Fossalta di Piave-and, of course, Cantwell was wounded there too...
...His artistic failure can be compared with the colonel's loss of his regiment, and other defeats...
...Not that he ever fully abandons the hard, tinny, and rather loveless edge to his accomplished sentences...
...When the narrative is most interesting, it consciously reminds .us of his earlier works, and does so repeatedly...
...It is possible that Hemingway reinforced the idea of artistic failure by naming the dying colonel Richard Cantwell...
...There are echoes of the great basic rhythms of A Farewell to Arms: "The trees were black and moved in the wind, and there were no leaves on them...
...I could be part of the ground where the children play in the evenings, and in the mornings, maybe, they would still be training jumping horses and their hoofs would make the thudding on the turf, and trout would rise in the pool when there was a hatch of Y• Not at all surprisingly, Hemingway brings in his old rivalry and peculiar relationship with Scott Fitzgerald, a source of his earlier fictional energy, by alluding to a central passage from Gatsby: "They were coming up on Nestre fast, and already it was like going to New York the first time you were ever there in the old days when it was shining, white and beautiful...
...Name Address City State Zip Telephone rn~r_ CnyrrivrT (YbM11(W COMING...
...He had been a brigadier general and had commanded a regiment but lost it disastrously and been reduced to colonel: he wears "an old combat jacket, with a patch on the left shoulder that no one understood, and with the slight light places on the straps, where stars had been removed...
...James T. Farrell ridiculed him as "Robert Cantwritewell...
...But at what may be its fundamental level the novel is about the decline of Hemingway's powers as an artist...
...It locates the sources of literary power in the past, in earlier works and earlier experiences...
Vol. 16 • July 1983 • No. 7
