The Best of Hemingway:

...In renouncing Romero, Brett voluntarily assumes a frustration like Jake's involuntary one, and at the end of the book we see the two of them in heartbreaking fraternal embrace in a cab...

...In the self-disgust of the autobiographical protagonist in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," he suggests that some inner failure demands the outer stifling...

...The style is stripped and economical, using the simplest of means and vocabulary, presenting observed behavior and conversation with a minimum of comment or analysis...

...Nevertheless, the story is so beautifully structured, its vision of delayed and short-lived initiation into manhood so powerful, that it triumphs anyway...

...I do feel such a bitch," Brett says when she goes off with Romero...

...I never met Hemingway...

...after her affair with Romero, Brett says "He's wiped out that damned Cohn," Robert Cohn is based on a known prototype, but Heiningway has written a good deal of himself into the character...

...at thirty a master," Archibald MacLeish has written of Hemingway, but he omits the melancholy conclusion: over the hill at thirty-five...

...Famous at twenty-five...

...With my true, wonderful memories," a miracle has occurred through Hemingway's art, and lies have become truth...

...The prose is less firm than it is in Hemingway's earlier stories...

...and the ending is weak and inadequate...

...He is that aspect of the artist that is perpetually wounded and alienated, the outsider, what John Berryman called "the imaginary Jew...

...In addition to the organized rituals of the bullfight and the fiesta, drinking, eating, fishing, even playing bridge, are made ceremonial and numinous...

...the endings of "After the Storm" and "A Clean, WellLighted Place...

...The moving last scene of Book I, when Brett Ashley and the narrator, Jake Barnes, confess their love for each other and part miserably, concludes: "The door opened and I went up-stairs and went to bed...

...and I tried with very little success to copy it...

...his wife's awful remarks to Macomber are less harrowing than the awful remarks everyone makes to Cohn because less obviously the product of inner hurt...

...We are told of Robert Cohn: "He stood up from the table his face white, and stood there white and angry behind the little plates of hors d'oeuvres...

...Its syntax is parenthetical and conversational rather than "literary...

...Castrated in the war, Jake is the true bullfighter steer...

...I feel rather good, you know," she says when she gives him up...

...In college, like every other ambitious English major in the nation, I studied his prose, with its short sentences, its sparse modifiers, and its rhythmic repetitions...

...We could have had such a damned good time together," Brett cries, and Jake answers, as the motion of the cab presses Brett against him, "Isn't it pretty to think so...

...when his characters walk through Paris, he names every street and what they see on it...

...He says of his wound: "I try and play it along and just not make trouble for people...

...Hemingway is not the first American writer stifled by fame and wealth...

...The technique is like that of a mosaic...

...The first Christmas present I gave the fiction writer I was then courting and am now married to was Hemingway's collected stories, just out...

...when Cohn beats up the bullfighter, Pedro Romero, the latter can wash away the beating only in the hull-ring...

...The Undefeated," the story of an old bullfighter's failure at a comeback, carries the same absolute conviction...

...The Sun Also Rises seems to me Hemingway's only completely honest novel...

...Waiting for the ambulance, the boy hears two horseplayers agree that "He had it coming to him on the stuff he's pulled," and the boy comments bitterly in the story's last line: "Seems like when they get started they don't leave a guy nothing...

...Their absurd boasts (in the language of True Romances), their copious tears, and their nasty abuse of each other are grotesquely funny, yet as an expression of what Freud called "the omnipotent wish," they are oddly touching...

...Since then I have read each book as it appeared, not often with joy, and have followed the celebrated public career, sometimes with disgust, but each time I encounter a Hemingway story in an anthology I remember the greatness of his talent and achievement...

...talking to him, Jake thinks only "I wanted a hot bath in deep water...

...In the course of the treatment his wife dies, and the story ends with a beautiful dying fall, with the fencer sitting at the therapy machine, surrounded by cheery photographs of hands like his completely restored, and the narrator's comment: "The photographs did not make much difference to the major because he only looked out of the window...

...I loved my old man so much...

...More than that, in boldly choosing for his subject matter the love between an impotent man and a frigid promiscuous woman, Hemingway found a truly representative and deeply disturbing metaphor for the human condition...

...In another sense, he is the uninitiate, and any contact with him is a pollution...

...In one sense, as the book makes clear, Cohn is an innocent steer, gored by the bulls because they cannot get at their real tormenters...

...If, as they say, there is a thin shy ectomorph buried inside every stout hearty endomorph, The Sun Also Rises uncovers him...

...A wildly imaginative story, "The Light of the World," is about an encounter of two boys with some whores in a railroad station...

...I hate his damned suffering," Brett explains...

...By the time it might have been possible, he was "Papa" Hemingway the international playboy, and I did not particularly want to...

...I have no idea what thoughts go on in a bullfighter's mind in the ring, but they must certainly be the ones the story gives (as I find the emotions of the wounded lion in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" entirely convincing...

...If despite his great gifts Hemingway never became Melville or Tolstoy, Joyce or Proust, he nevertheless left us, in The Sun Also Rises and a handful of short stories, authentic masterpieces, small-scale but immortal...

...In the main plot, the relationship of Brett and Jake, there is a terrible pain and poignancy...

...When he thinks about Brett, Jake cries himself to sleep like a child...

...I first read Ernest Hemingway in high school, in the early 1930s, and I can still recall the excitement of the experience, although I had no idea why the books gave me such pleasure...

...Macomber is another look at Cohn, the American who never grew up, the artist as outsider...

...I lay down beside my old man, when they carried the stretcher into the hospital room, and hung onto the stretcher and cried and cried, and he looked so white and gone and so awfully dead, and I couldn't help feeling that if my old man was dead maybe they didn't need to have shot Gilford...

...WRITERS and WRITING The Best of Hemingway By Stanley Edgar Hyman When A writer who has been important to you dies, if you want to get the taste of the tributes in the mass-circulation magazines out of your mouth ("He was a cherished colleague of ours," said Life), the thing to do is to go back and read his best work...

...the marvelous dialogue with the landlady in "The Killers...

...The last of the stories I think first-rate, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," is about an American hunting in Africa who funks, then achieves courage for the first time in his life, and is immediately shot by his wife...

...When a meal is eaten, Hemingway identifies every dish...

...Lying with his hornwound at the end, refusing to let them cut off his hullfighter's pigtail, Manuel says: "I was going good...

...and some of the lovely fragments into which "The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" shatters...

...I urge you to read them...

...Along with these five thoroughly successful stories, parts of others are memorable: the beautiful camping and fishing detail of the "Big Two-Hearted River" stories, and the fine boxing detail of "Fifty Grand...

...The key action of the book is Brett's renunciation of Romero for the boy's own good, the first truly unselfish act of her life...

...This is not Spanish idiom, but it is something truer, the equivalent in our culture for what a bullfighter would say, and it has an absolute Tightness...

...After her affair with Cohn, Brett seems always compulsively bathing...

...LIKE The Sun Also Rises, the best stories are chronicles of defeat and loss, their endings deeply moving because every word in the story has built to the final effect...

...When one of the whores concludes with dignity: "Leave me with my memories...

...There are fine scenes and parts, too, in the later novels, but after The Sun Also Rises, I think, none is a complete success...

...Life is ritual," Lionel Johnson used to tell Yeats, and in The Sun Also Rises it truly is...

...Its authenticity and truth to a boy's emotions are overwhelming...

...My Old Man," a boy's account of his love for his father, a crooked jockey, is written in a marvelous first-person narrative style derived from Huckleberry Finn...

...value ("You must get to know the values," the Count says...

...The ironic themes of The Sun, Also Rises are introduced by means of a few repeated key words: fun ("We will have fun," Brett says...

...I don't know...

...The book's important subplot involves Robert Cohn, the outsider and Jew on the fringe of the group...

...After the shock of reading of his death (and Time did not spare the bloody details) I sat down and read the work I have always thought Hemingway's best, his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, and the short stories...

...Hemingway writes: "The lady who had him, her name was, Frances, found toward the end of the second year tha,t her looks were going...

...Hemingway demonstrates Mies van der Rohe's "Less is more" in his marvelous use of understatement in the book...

...The prose is no less than masterly...

...He's quite one of us," Brett says of the Count to Jake, and it is something no one would say of Cohn...

...the sensitivity to a child's mind in "A Day's Wait...

...Every detail functions...

...luck ("It's rotten luck" is Jake's strongest commiseration...

...The question of whether the individual or the culture is primarily responsible when a writer like Hemingway does not mature beyond his early work, or improve on its excellence, is ultimately unanswerable and pointless...

...I was going great...

...Two of the whores compete in lying about their intimacy with the boxer Stanley Ketchel, whom they call "Steve...

...Cohn provokes everyone's nastiness in the book...

...His hoof might have got well...

...From A Farewell to Arms to The Old Man and the Sea, they show a progressive emotional softening, an increasing self-indulgent slackness of the prose, less and less control of the id's fantasy gratifications and the ego's defense mechanisms...

...When the jockey is killed in a steeplechase race, the narrator says: "My old man was dead when they brought him in and while a doctor was listening to his heart with a thing plugged in his ears, I heard a shot up the track that meant they'd killed Gilford...

...Another superb story, "In Another Country," is about an Italian fencing champion, getting machine therapy for his mutilated hand during the First World War...

...as Jake says, "Cohn had a wonderful quality of bringing out the worst in anybody...