Hemingway's Abortive Resurrection
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing HEMINGWAY'S ABORTIVE RESURRECTION BY PEARL K. BELL In all his work, good and bad, the essence of Hemingway's world was the hero, the man inspired to sudden, life-giving...
...What Philip Rahv wrote in 1952 about another Hemingway turkey, Across the River and Into the Trees, is even more devastatingly true of Islands in the Stream: "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...
...When all the contemplative possibilities have been so severely ruled out, when the sense of society is not merely neglected but aggressively discarded as irrelevant to the hero, soon the only way to go is down...
...From the '40s on, however, the hero became increasingly identified with the legendarily famous writer...
...He needed to see women and they were welcome for a while...
...Since her husband's death Mrs...
...That was Hemingway's last act of artistic heroism, as his widow's misguidedly energetic salvage-work makes all too clear...
...And the hero as artist could, in prose of unprecedented purity and rigor, distill a kind of breathtaking verbal virility from the tough, spare masculine pursuit of danger and victory...
...And it is a pity that Islands in the Stream, his dull, pathetic worst, will only obscure Hemingway's true greatness still more...
...Let's just have the sea in being and leave it at that"), he learns that his eldest son, now an Air Force pilot, has been shot down over France...
...The subject of these exhausted platitudes is Thomas Hudson--tiresomely referred to throughout by his full two names--a painter who in the 1930s is living a contentedly quiet and productive life on the Gulf Stream island of Bimini, due east of Miami...
...If a certain unmistakable sentimentality lurked beneath all that hard-bellied machismo, it did not seriously damage Hemingway's impeccable, commanding style for some time (most flagrantly in For Whom the Bell Tolls...
...He merely abandoned writing about other persons--where his self-consciousness at being a celebrity mangled any effort at objective description--for a confrontation with the vicissitudes of nature and its creatures...
...Yet even as early as 1935, Edmund Wilson had gone to the heart of it all when he complained that Green Hills of Africa was Hemingway's weakest book to date: ". . .something dreadful seems to happen to Hemingway as soon as he begins to write in the first person...
...But the revival has not been accompanied by a corresponding faith in "Literature as Experience...
...the violence and brutality of war...
...as they seem never old enough to reproduce, merely sufficiently mature to make the motions of the act of love...
...After returning from one expedition, heavy with pompous simplicities ("Let's not think about the sea nor what is on it or under it, or anything connected with it...
...Only in the final section of the novel does any of this bilge begin to rise above mean water level and seem even dimly recognizable as the work of the master who wrote A Farewell to Arms and the wonderfully crafted stories of In Our Time...
...Papa never went anywhere or said anything or, much worse, wrote anything without watching it all in his private hall of mirrors, a shining armor turned inward to reflect only the over-photographed face of the over-renowned man...
...He heads for a favorite Havana bar, where he downs several hundred double frozen daiquiris ("without sugar," we are relentlessly reminded) and talks for hours with rum-defying lucidity to his favorite Cuban whore, a golden-hearted beauty now gone to seed who is called, so help us, Honest Lil...
...In his fiction, the conflicting elements of his nature, the emotional situations which obsess him, are externalized and objectified...
...To paraphrase an old saying: When a writer's widow is also his literary executor, he doesn't need an enemy...
...There remains this tantalizing question: Why have certain immensely talented American writers of the 20th century--Mailer is the youngest who comes to mind--been so prone, in middle age and even before, to a crippling decline...
...The prose is readable and, on rare occasion, sinewy and vigorous...
...Some critics felt Hemingway made a comeback in The Old Man and the Sea, but to me that long story did not seem a truly encouraging sign of the return of his earlier powers, though it was much the best thing he had written in years...
...If this sober impeachment was true in the '30s only of Hemingway's writing in the first person, the blight of mawkish self-indulgence soon spread to all his work...
...Writers & Writing HEMINGWAY'S ABORTIVE RESURRECTION BY PEARL K. BELL In all his work, good and bad, the essence of Hemingway's world was the hero, the man inspired to sudden, life-giving greatness by extraordinary circumstances--hunting in the Michigan woods...
...But as soon as he speaks in his own person, he seems to lose all his capacity for self-criticism and is likely to become fatuous or maudlin...
...Hudson and a group of tough seaworthy comrades set out in the painter's Q-boat to hunt down the survivors of a sunken German submarine...
...It is merely one aspect of that compulsive veneration of youth, that fear of all which is not simply strong and beautiful, so important to our total culture...
...By his first wife, a movie star, Hudson had one son, and by his second, an overorganized battle-axe, he had two more...
...I suppose it is the death of the adolescent faith in Life as Experience which has led to a complementary loss of the ingenuous faith in Literature as Experience...
...after one or two inexpert attempts, they find a style, a subject and tone, usually anchored in their adolescent experience--and these they repeat compulsively...
...Perhaps fiction that concentrates obsessively on the muscular pleasure of heroic action, however brilliant, is subject more than most literary art to the law of diminishing returns...
...What he cared about was painting and his children and he was still in love with the first woman he had been in love with...
...The writing in this book is almost always lame, feeble, mortally fatigued: "He has been successful in almost every way except in his married life, although he had never cared, truly, about success...
...He had loved many women since and sometimes someone would come to stay on the island...
...Let's not think of it at all...
...And now a novel comes forth from the vaults to further muddy his troubled reputation...
...In the case of Islands in the Stream (Scribner's, 466 pp., $10.00), appearing eight years after Hemingway's sad and desperate death, the pretense that this disastrously bad novel was worthy of being added to the canon is, to begin with, a monstrous lapse of judgment...
...Leslie Fiedler wrote about this cogently in the mid-'50s: "Even our best writers appear unable to mature...
...Here the focus is on the action of pursuit, and on the treacherously beautiful coastline--rather than, as earlier, on the stupefyingly sententious narcissism of the Hudson-Hemingway catechism...
...It] is a work manifestly composed in a state of distemper, if not actual demoralization...
...Winkling the boat along the tricky coves of the Cuban coast, the small expedition searches tirelessly for the slippery Germans who have left a savage trail of corpses and burning shacks in their wake...
...Hemingway has given the world his execrable memoir, A Moveable Feast, with its undisguised malice, backfiring nastiness and unenlightening desecration of such former friends as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Madox Ford...
...Eheu fugaces...
...The pure vision of freedom and bravery that Hemingway at his best "turned into something as hard as a crystal and as disturbing as a great lyric," to cite Edmund Wilson again, is probably ancient, unimportant history to the young...
...shooting big game in Africa...
...fishing the challenging depths of the Caribbean...
...bullfighting...
...why, once the flush of their early success had subsided, do they lapse into the repetitious, degrading banality of egoism...
...and the result is an impersonal art that is severe and intense, deeply serious...
...The opening section of the novel is devoted mainly to the sons' visit with their father on the island...
...Now the pendulum has swung back with a vengeance to "the adolescent faith in Life as Experience" which Fiedler prematurely pronounced dead...
...Hemingway's] characters seem never really old enough to vote, merely to blow up bridges...
...Suddenly the movie-star exwife turns up and they have an idyllic interlude of lovemaking to mourn the loss of their young son...
...The only moments in this section that take on even a faint breath of life occur in the account of a deep-sea-fishing expedition, a sort of Young Man and the Sea, when the middle son, David, makes an extraordinarily heroic effort to land a behemoth marlin, fails, and tries to be stoical about his failure...
...The cold, hard, almost impersonal act of soul-cleansing defiance against a brutal environment was replaced by the self-congratulatory egoism of the middle-aged Man of Fame, as he was depicted with such merciless accuracy in Lillian Ross' New Yorker profile...
...A few years later, during World War II, Hudson is living in Cuba and doing secret antisubmarine work for the American Navy...
...What he achieved was an exhilarating immediacy of natural detail and stress, a powerful rendering of the menacing sea in which man and marlin are pitted against each other to the death...
Vol. 53 • October 1970 • No. 20
