Age of the Emotive Man
HUGHES, JOHN W.
Age of the Emotive Man THE FIFTH COLUMN By Ernest Hemingway Scribners. 151 pp. $4.95. iHERMANOS! By William Herrick Simon and Schuster. 379 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by JOHN W. HUGHES Ernest...
...T. S. Eliot, his eclectic counterpart, stayed on in Europe to commune with the spirits of Dante, Heraclitus and St...
...William Herrick tries to express everything in a Big War Novel, and jHermanos...
...But in "The Butterfly and the Tank," the callous detachment, true scutcheon of the emotive man, intrudes...
...Reviewed by JOHN W. HUGHES Ernest Hemingway tramped through the literature of the Old World like a conquistador, selecting and adapting its techniques and attitudes, fusing traditional forms with new and exotic areas of experience...
...It was the age of the emotive man...
...His Flaubertian irony was incapable of the sonorities that would juxtapose his nihilism with a more positive ethic...
...That final irony of Jake Barnes' ("Isn't it pretty to think so...
...whatever rational thought might be necessary, the commissars would handle...
...We are offered nasty and brutal commissars (comic stars, the troops called them) and a sympathetic Jewish Communist hero, Jake Starr, who dies a supposedly tragic death after a supposedly credible affair with the breasty but guilt-laden wife of a British Communist (who also happens to be a Nobel Prize-winning scientist...
...a whole generation of English poets had come to fight (and die) on Spanish soil...
...The other two stories in the book suffer the same fate...
...he remained a journalist to the very end, describing as simply and ruthlessly as he could an emotional and moral vacuum alien to the conventional artistic resolutions...
...The sensitivity of Nick Adams and of all the later Hemingway heroes is grounded in a kind of diffidence...
...His sadistic and pretentious warping of the genre qualifies Herrick as an authentic Stalinist, a commissar of the imagination...
...The scientist is, of course, made a symbol of reason and order, which Herrick, another emotive man, despises...
...Yet the early stories are more striking for their precise, if essentially simplistic, narrative technique...
...In his later years, Eliot plodded along peacefully as a director at Faber, preparing for his installation at Westminster Abbey...
...Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is a painful book to read because he understood so well the hopelessness of the Spanish War and the consequences of a Nationalist victory...
...Before he left, he published four short stories about the fighting (in Esquire and Cosmopolitan) ; they are appearing in book form for the first time, with the play added to pad out the volume...
...Herrick served in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, and there was probably a time when he could have directed his limited literary talents toward giving posterity the kind of personal account Orwell set down in Homage to Catalonia...
...If the plot reminds you of Irving Wallace, you are absolutely on the beam...
...Everyone was reading Auden's Spanish War poems and Hemingway's frontline dispatches...
...is the result-a tasteless, inauthentic and vain hodgepodge...
...Hemingway never saw the need for an objective ordering of reality...
...The object was, to use one of Hemingway's favorite phrases, to be "muy emocionado...
...the commissars are grade B spy-movie material...
...Hemingway always took pains to let people know that he had learned about irony and indirection from the great schoolmasters, Flaubert and Turgenev...
...Hemingway's main contribution to the art of fiction was his impressionistic journalism, which enabled him to capture what Hopkins called the "inscape," the mysterious selfhood of a person or thing...
...Flaubert and Joyce avoided tragic situations in their writing...
...To make her sexuality even more heinous than Lady Brett's, the protagonist, Philip, is not a castrate but rather has devoted himself, somewhat offhandedly, to the Communist cause...
...this is why his greatest novel, The Sun Also Rises, concludes on such an unsatisfactory note...
...The politics here, to paraphrase Eliot, do not matter...
...Reason was out...
...A fellow by the name of Joe Garms, a kind of raunchy, savage soldier, serves as an outlet for what Herrick thinks are the real nitty-gritty issues of a civil war: wanton fornication, hatred of all authority, and an abysmal and compulsive profanity...
...Herrick would have us believe that he is transmitting an Orwellian message about the evils of both fascism and totalitarian communism...
...The play makes good reading, however, and its moral and political vacillation provides an excellent introduction to the stories...
...In The Fifth Column, Hemingway's romantic attachment to the cause is revealed in his portrayal of Dorothy...
...Hemingway struggled with the terrible conflicts manifest in his earliest stories to their horrifying, self-destructive end...
...and the adulterous wife is probably the biggest wet dream in contemporary literature, which is saying something...
...He might adorn his authorial detachment with the configurations of the European ironists, or with a Joycean poetic naturalism, but it remained something basically non-European, a stance opposed to the emotional logic shaping the literary traditions of the West...
...There are Communist good guys and Fascist bad guys, an exciting raid on an artillery observation post, and an unconvincing speech by Philip on the oppressed classes...
...Hemingway, in his final paranoiac frenzy, was fighting imaginary fbi men in Idaho...
...And as Franco and his Moorish mercenaries came closer and closer to victory, the commissars began to act like Fascists: they were the most reasonable of men, ready to please...
...John of the Cross...
...by the time the story ends, we have forgotten about the injustice of slaughter of men by men, having been caught up in the complications of the author's ironic technique...
...The author's capacity for describing varied indelicacies is indeed enormous, and he often attains an almost classic ugliness: "He vomited all over himself, some of the previous day's codfish splashing on the dead fascist's face...
...the dreadful ambivalence Nick feels toward his sternly moralistic father, the treacherous yet vastly significant mysteries of the Indian camp, the heady violence of the hunt or the drunken brawl-these things could not be "truly" expressed or resolved with the equipment of a Flaubert...
...Jake Starr is no more a Jew than Franco (why does Herrick try to make him one...
...Communism thus serves Hemingway as a marvelous ploy for getting rid of still another mistress: Dorothy's bourgeois tendencies are quite crudely and senselessly contrasted with Philip's derring-do machinations for the causa...
...It is the author who is the comic star, for his characters are comic-strip caricatures...
...Hemingway never overcame this desperately solipsistic impasse...
...But in a number of battle scenes and character sketches in these four stories, he is right on the mark...
...His personal tragedy followed (as A. E. Hotchner has shown in Papa Hemingway) from the drastic failure of his art: He was never to transcend the emotional castration that had first given impulse to his creativity...
...By this time Hemingway had left Spain and settled down to write For Whom the Bell Tolls, the most depressing and unresolved of all Spanish War novels...
...he becomes a victim of what George Orwell might call an emotional Stalinism...
...Though his passion to see things "truly" eventually became aberrant, it remained of undeniably heroic magnitude...
...In his play set against the war, The Fifth Column, he presents a girl named Dorothy, as pleasantly bitchy as Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises...
...Only this decade could generate a semihistorical novel containing such drivelingly adolescent excres-censes...
...Hemingway's famous "ascetic" style was a mere facade, concealing something much more primitive than anybody could have guessed...
...Like Hopkins, Hemingway sometimes lost the overall effect of a scene by concentrating too much on inscape...
...He was right to attack the brusque terror tactics of the commissars...
...Herrick tries to merge the current sex 'n violence novel with that old-time Popular Front ideal, the proletarian novel...
...But the results are peculiar...
...The Homeric precision of such a description seems easy to achieve, but very few writers can carry it off...
...fails to unify the themes of anti-Semitism, impotence and social decay which the work has so powerfully developed...
...The senseless murder of a civilian by soldiers becomes a vehicle for the Hemingway irony...
...Hemingway's tragic sensibility was cut off at the roots, unable to extend beyond the personal...
...Under the Ridge" is Hemingway at his all-too-infrequent best?surmounting his irony and cynicism to sympathize with the victims of human tragedy...
...Hemingway tried to express tragic emotions through their ironic perspective, and this is why he has been so misunderstood...
...The Spanish Civil War provided Hemingway with a spiritual barometer for his art and his character...
...In "Under the Ridge," he describes a Communist officer who shoots a deserting French soldier: "I noticed his eyes were a greyish-yellow and that they did not blink at all...
...His wanderings ended in a return to the American Heartland, the place of his ultimate apotheosis...
...This visceral local color is exceeded in vulgarity by some of the yeasty lovemaking, as when Sarah, the pneumatic heroine, bellows her "sublime cry" during the first shack-up scene?Please, hurry, burden me with the weight of love...
...But the emotive men, the romantics and the emotional Stalinists, had always neglected the realities of war, thinking these could best be handled by the bureaucrats...
Vol. 52 • November 1969 • No. 22
