Devouring the Hemingway Corpus

...Writers & Writing DEVOURING THE HEMINGWAY CORPUS BY QUENTIN ANDERSON When Ernest Hemingway said of our writers, "We destroy them in many ways," he was thinking mostly of money and success But there is a way more purely native to Americans We have needed our writers too much, and that has made us insatiable Up to World War I we were partly screened from our demands on them by the public dimensions of which the country boasted-political innovation, growth, know-how, power-yet these never quite compensated for our lack of an imaginative grasp of our scene Books had always been asked to fill more space in this country than m England or Europe, when the seemingly secure public dimensions grew more transparent after 1918, our need for a fuller imaginative possession of our world was acutely felt Hemingway answered that need, but no writer could even come close to satisfying it...

...The publication of The Nick Adams Stones (Scribners, 268 pp, $7 95) is a case of insatiability pushed to the limit of indiscriminate greed, not simply commercial greed, but a desire to make Hemingway just the kind of imaginative commodity he is not Sixteen of the stories Philip Young has assembled here originally appeared in In Our Time (1925), Men Without Women (1927), and Winner Take Nothing (1933) One of them ("The Light of the World") does not identify Nick Adams by name, I find at least one other published piece that was left out ("A Very Short Story"), though there is no apparent reason of fact or tone for its exclusion As far as can be determined, the canon is a bit arbitrary Yet the book poses more serious questions than this...

...All that is perhaps familiar Not so familiar is the fact that this opportunity to cut writing free of institutional things, to pare away what mother and father had said and what the old men of Versailles had said, did not last very long While it lasted Hemingway could write "true" sentences, he could liberate those arcs of human action that had palpable consummations, and sear with scorn whatever was dead around him by merely setting it against what was alive There is a reductive account of this process which calls it existentialist-as if the Americans of the '20s felt the need to contrive a dialectic counter to centuries of European history, philosophy, theology 1 It is more tempting to link this epoch of Hemingway's career with that of Flaubert, who is described m an early Roland Barthes essay as having made the momentous discovery that writing did not have to be associated with the bourgeois view that bourgeois writing embraced all reality But Hemingway's work did not-if anybody's ever has 1-effect an impersonal disjunction The effort to make the disconnection from the dead uses of language involved Hemingway himself...

...Thus, what we inherit is the three collections of stories and The Sun Also Rises These we must praise and pieserve against the ignorance that blurs them and the greed that distorts them We must also admit that in them the scale of human action is immensely reduced, yet our fathers knew what they were about when they made them exemplary If we look back on our classics, Hemingway seems generous Walt Whitman and the Concord men had made human action unthinkable, Herman Melville had found an action but shrouded it in what Hemingway calls his "rhetoric", Mark Twain had offered an unexampled gift of speech m the mouth of a boy whose every attempt to act is turned into a he by his world Though the images of grace, virtuosity and courage that Hemingway offered did not create a large social space for us, they did create a space for human action-not enough to live m but enough to cherish...

...The first involves the long section Hemingway cut from the end of 'Big Two-Hearted River," a iambling reflection on fishing, the cost of marriage m fishing companions bullfighting American writers whom he names, his desire to do as a writer what Cezanne had done as a painter, and so on In Hemingway's final version, Nick decides not to fish the swamp that day and returns to camp In Young s volume the lopped-off section does not appear at the end of the story (which it overlaps) but later on, presumably because it is ' anachronistic " For his second undoing...

...Here was a vocabulary that was not compelled to disavow the past because it seemed to have none Hemingway was not itchy or doctrinaire, he was, for instance, content to be called a Catholic so long as it was granted that he was "a very dumb Catholic " What lay just over the edges of the sentences his readers responded to was not a large complex world, but rather a seductive danger he was avoiding-the lapse into uncontrolled feeling, the inward abysses of fear, the lost kingdom of infancy This is what the reviewers of the '20s presumably meant when they spoke of the "tough guy" or the Hemingway code of behavior, the felt and intimated danger was that everything would go bad inside you...

...The Hemingway who, m 1925, was reading Thomas Mann and Ivan Turgenev, and carrying Leo Tolstoy and Joseph Conrad m his book bag, could not have cared less what (let us imagine he is reading The Magic Mountain) a Naphta, a Settembrini or a Mynheer Peeperkorn embodied or said The books did not involve him with Europe or the past, they were exhibits of various kinds of virtuosity He had separated writing from the business of being a member of anything, and that was a sweet and terrifying relief to the Americans who read him The things he was silently shearing away slid like agonizing loads off the backs of his readers...

...This is the very book that rang down through the '50s as the source of insight into what it would be like to be truly alive, to rejoice in those things that were within the human scale and exhibited human glory, the book of all books for those Americans who sought an image of true consummations Or, to turn it around, these tiny but resounding victories over bitter and ugly circumstance were all we could believe in, but with what a passion of belief Hemingway did inspire his thousands...

...Nor do I see any excuse for breaking up the collection into sections and giving them titles that will in the minds of the unwary take on the authority of Hemingway's own titles Consider what a distortion of Hemingway's work may emerge in the minds of hapless high school students whose instructors order this book for their use' Hemingway's estate, Scribners and Philip Young have not lived up to their responsibilities in publishing this volume, and they should simply withdraw it Since their decision to bring it out is simply an extreme example of the widely shared insatiability I mentioned at the outset, I will try to explain the character of that insatiability and how Hemingway's early work satisfied it...

...But, says the student of the theory of fiction, you are sowing confusion What the bullfighter does to assert himself and to betray himself should not be superimposed on what Hemingway accomplished through his virtuosity as a writer The student is wrong, I believe The confusion is Hemingway's, and it can almost be described as his enabling fault, the inconsistency at the root of the power in his early work What had been primary, the focus on the virtuosity of the writer, who made those sentences which treed us from false communion, and announced the true though minute communions of action, gave way to what had been secondary, the virtuosity of the represented persons This is what best explains the deadness that overtook Hemingway after the mid-'30s We cannot blame him tor no longer feeling what he was no longer experiencing, the very process of disconnection was over When he tried to reinstitute what he had already destroyed m his early prose, the belief that human community could be experienced (To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bell Tolls), he faked it And when he tried mere unsupported self-justifying virtuosity (The Old Man and the Sea), he was lavishing his very great talent on a hopeless enterprise...

...And what a heavy price was paid, it now seems, for each of the moments of consummation The moment of purest and clearest human agency, when Romero thrusts his sword into the bull and they become one, is subject to the most profound violation when the bullfighter thrusts into Lady Brett Hemingway's involvement with these represented actions is too complex to be described here It leads to such questions as, is writing a process of becoming one with the thing you kill-in this instance the friendships you betray...

...Young prints the rejected opening of "Indian Camp, where the small boy grows frightened while his father and uncle are off hunting and fires three gunshots to summon them back to camp...

...Young has interspersed eight unpublished Nick Adams pieces among those taken from the three earlier collections, reordering them to conform with what he believes to be their sequence in the "life" of this character In two instances the result is even worse than printing what Hemingway clearly did not wish to bring out, it is an undoing of what the author had done...

...We may be sure that a good many people would press for the publication of the eight unused pieces One is an evidently finished story, here called "Summer People ' that juxtaposes the defeated desire of a man who isn't with it with the delicious sexual triumph of a man who is (The prototypes are easily identifiable m the Carlos Baker biography ) Another is a long self-indulgent fantasy built on the episode of Hemingway's shooting a heron and getting into trouble with the game warden, he contrives an evasion with his favorite sister in which an imaginative binding of killing and incestuous impulse becomes apparent But there is no excuse for associating this discarded material with the published stories as Young has...

...The contrast between Hemingway and William Faulkner points up what we have been hungering for and failing to get by way of self-definition Faulkner could not write anything without invoking some sort of human communion on the plane of the fiction itself Families, town, neighborhoods, the South frame his people Yet his prose often shows the strain of the attempt to engage more social reality than it could establish, more than there was to be had I imagine that this was the basis for Hemingway's scorn of him Since we have not had a writer who could articulate an action with a community, our insatiable appetite will persist To call Nick Adams "memorable" as Young does is to subvert Hemingway's own war on memorabilia A little self-restraint is called tor Don't mess with the texts ! Quentin Anderson, a new contributor to these pages, is Professor of English at Columbia University and author of The Imperial Self, published last year by Knopf...

...He found himself free-and this is where he touches Gertrude Stein-to take his own loves and hates, his own meanness and pride, for absolutes, free to be, on his energetic miniature scale, a one-man culture that engendered its own laws and its own conditions of being How such meanness, such a capacity for betrayal, could distance itself sufficiently from the inward confusion it seemed bound to produce so that he could sit down and write, is one of the mysteries of genius Two weeks after the unpleasant brassy-tasting events of the fiesta, with its ugly triangular and even quadrangular stresses between Harold Loeb, Lady Duff Twysden, Pat Guthiie and Hemingway himself, the writer was at work on The Sun Also Rises...