Hemingway alive

...The immensely influential style and manner left a permanent imprint on American fiction, no doubt of it - both for good and ill...

...I wish we could help him...

...The only other man who seemed to me to be as much present in a room as Emest was FDR, and I am not excepting Churchill...

...But to say that of Hemingway is to muddy the record and in a way to play his game...

...On the very next instant he could write movingly of Fitzgerald that he "loved him very much" and with the sweet understanding bred of love say to his and Scott's editor and friend Maxwell Perkins: "It was a terrible thing for him to love youth so much that he jumped straight from youth to senility without going through manhood...

...SAUL MALOFF is a regular contributor to Commonweal, and how we all take special pains to say this, as if it were a debt we owed him: before he went downstairs very, early that morning in Ketchum, Idaho, and put both barrels of the Boss shotgun to his head and, holding the gun butt securely to the floor, blew away his entire cranial vault...

...Edited by Carlos Baker...

...Scribners, $27.50, 948 pp...

...He was a journalist before he was a novelist and he staked his honor on such things...

...Hemingway wrote to a friend of MacLeish: "He's gotten . . .a goddamned bore...

...and as a writer he still presents a problem for critical assessment, a major and greatly perplexing one...

...Strange mixture of peurility [sic-quite enough has been written about EH's spelling and other epistolary eccentricities] and senility . . . too bloody pompous...

...Because I am very shy," he said, "I drink sometimes to make people bearable...

...With Edmund Wilson he was furious for many reasons over many years, not least because he was convinced that Wilson's research was shoddy, careless, inaccurate...

...So tear this part out and bum it" (Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961...

...It may also lead eventually to the making of the landmark novels by which we tell time and distance...

...and now seen in its most undeliberated, spontaneous form it still makes good wintry reading...

...OF COURSE Hemingway's base talent for venomous ridicule and abuse of an incomparable nastiness is well known in general - from the biographies and his own books, very much including the posthumous A Moveable Feast...

...For anyone still taken in by those other, contrary, combative stories so long in circulation, Hemingway provides the best and most persuasive accounting...

...Of his deadly mother he could say in so many words, in a letter to Charles Scribner: ". . . I hate her guts and she hates mine" - for no better reason, such is filial ingratitude, than that she drove his father to suicide, or so he believed, and would do the same to him if he permitted it...

...So forget it . . . I wouldn't want to hurt his bloody feelings for anything...

...Sort of man Hemingway could be, a bastard in his bones, though at his best he could be one hell of a writer...

...in the case of his sad and fragile friend, affection and pity, fraternal or paternal love, outweighed envy, though he knew better than anyone else exactly how good (so good, he wrote Perkins, it was frightening) Scott could be, and also how bad (so bad it could break your heart).'' Scott died inside himself at around the age of thirty to thirty-five," he wrote Perkins,'' and his creative powers died somewhat later...

...That's the sort of man MacLeish could be, decent in his bones, even if he wasn't much of a poet and still less of a playwright...

...yet so little of the total body of work remains fixed in the canon of American literature...

...Righteous, fussy, and a bloody bore...

...Now, twenty years after his death, and how many more years after his literary death, just as we think we have him well and truly buried, here he is again, violently, rampantly, disconcertingly alive in the much-delayed publication of some six hundred out of the perhaps seven thousand letters he wrote between 1917 when he lay wounded in a Red Cross hospital in Milan, mad about war and in love with the 122 fragments of shrapnel embedded in his flesh, and 1961 when he wrote touchingly to the nine-year-old son of his doctor three weeks before his death...

...Invention is the finest thing," as he wrote Scott in another connection - in fact while castigating him for certain improbabilities in Tender Is the Night, "but you cannot invent anything that would not actually happen...

...In an earlier letter to Perkins he asks to have his "great affection" conveyed to Scott and adds: "I always had a very stupid little boy feeling of superiority about Scott - like a tough little boy sneering at a delicate but talented little boy...

...A brief sampling cannot hope to impart more than a suggestion of the richness, scope, variety, and force as well as the limitations, defects, blindness, and craziness of the letters...

...they're alive with the power of his presence...

...And of its kind this is one of his gentler sentiments...

...The supposition was fashionable and influential though it is founded in a naive confusion of art and life...

...Not the smallest gift conferred by this autobiography-in-letters is that now, finally, we may put to rest all further psychobabble about the "hidden wound," that old canard and darling of thesis-mongering psychoanalytic critics Reich-ian and Freudian - the genital wound supposedly incurred on the Italian front and later surfacing as Jake Barnes's most melancholy condition in The Sun Also Rises and elsewhere in his work...

...A man lives in them...

...Almost the only writer of stature whom he didn't see as the competition, a rival in need of being bested - either among his contemporaries or among the great "deads" as he called the masters, they being the likes of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Melville no less - was Scott...

...Wilson, he was certain, was bent on "putting me out of business" as a writer and equally bent on maliciously "knifing" Scott Fitzgerald in the public prints whenever he could...

...One by one they fall: Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Max Eastman, the Sitwells, the later Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, Steinbeck, the list is endless and unsparing...

...I shouldn't write this...

...Just when we thought he was dead and gone, buried and forgotten, here he is again, pounding on the door, beating it down.ating it down...

...a man he was manysided...

...though as so often with Hemingway (and the rest of us) one must judge how that weighed against other motives, for example, Wilson's insufficient regard for his, Hemingway's, work, and his, Hemingway's, contempt for the non-combatant Wilson (and nearly everyone else who did not fight in the War - some war, any war...

...For Max Eastman (the background is recounted at length and in bloody detail in Carlos Baker's authorized biography) he had ". . . an ambition to nail that son of a bitch to the top of a fence post with a twenty penny spike through the base of his you know what and then push him backwards slowly...

...Yet he could also be loving and tender - in fact moistly, openly sentimental, not surprising in this most sentimental of writers, this writer who confidently supposed he had constructed the literary means of containing and suppressing sentiment...

...No, not death, he didn't merely die...

...His feeling about truth-telling and accuracy was certainly as much moral as literary...

...Infection of the scrotum, happily entirely treatable and curable, while hardly amounting to castration, is close enough to concentrate the mind wonderfully, and being hospitalized along with many actual cases of radical genital damage can make a young man think very hard about ultimate matters...

...Tenderly loving as brother, son (selectively) and grandson, friend, husband, father - when he wasn't being hardboiled, a man's man and soldier's soldier, aficionado of the dance of death, friend to toreros and matadors, hunting and fishing comrade to others likeminded - those swaggering, hairychested, tiresome, quite unconvincing roles with which he is innocently associated by the gulls, often but by no means only media gulls, taken in by his public posturing...