ERNEST HEMINGWAY
53
thing else to be said. For as one compares the high virtues of Heming–
way's stories with the weakness of his latest novel and his first play,
although one is perfectly aware of all that must be charged against the
author himself, what forces itself into consideration
is
the cultural
~.t
mosphere which has helped to bring about the recent falling off. Inso–
far as we can ever blame a critical tradition for a writer's failures, we
must, I believe, blame American criticism for the illegitimate emer–
gence. of Hemingway the "man" and the resultant inferiority of his
two recent rnajor works.
It is certainly true that criticism of one kind or another has
played an unusually important part in Hemingway's career. Perhaps
no American talent has so publicly developed as Hemingway's: more
than any writer of our time he has been under glass, watched, checked
up on, predicted, suspected, warned. One part of his audience took
from
~
new styles of writing, of love-making, of very being; this
was the simpler part, but its infatuate imitation was of course a kind
of criticism. But another section of his audience responded negatively,
pointing out that the texture of Hemingway's work was made up of
cruelty, religion, anti-intellectualism, even of basic fascism, and looked
upon him as the active proponent of evil. Neither part of such an
audience could fail to make its impression upon a writer. The know–
ledge that he had set a fashion and become a legend may have been
gratifying btit surely
also
burdensome and depressing, and it must
have offered no small temptation. Yet perhaps more difficult for
Hemingway to support with equanimity, and, .from our point of view,
much more important, was the constant accusation that he had at–
tacked good human values. For upon Hemingway were turned all the
fine social feelings of the now passing decade, all the noble sentiments,
all
the desperate optimism, all the extreme rationalism, all the con–
tempt of irony and indirection-all the attitudes which, in the full
tide of the liberal-radical movement, became dominant in our thought
about literature. There was demanded of him earnestness and pity,
social consciousness, as it was called, something "positive" and "con–
structive" and literal. For is not life a simple thing and is not the
writer a villain or a counterrevolutionary who does not see it so?
As
if
under the pressure of this critical tradition, which persisted
in
misui.king the
"artist"
for the "man", Hemingway seems to have
undertaken to vindicate the ''man" by showing that he, too, could
muster the required "social" feelings in the required social way. At
any
rate, he now brought the ''man" with all his contradictions and
conflicts into
his
fiction. But "his ideas
abou~
life,"-!
quote Edmund
Wilson again-"or rather his sense of what happens and the way it
happens, is in his stories sunk deep below the surface and is not con-
