54
PARTISAN REVIEW
veyed by argument or preaching but by directly transmitted emo–
tion : it
is
turned into something as hard as crystal and as disturbing
as a great lyric. When he expounds this sense of life, however, in his
own character of Ernest Hemingway, the Old Master of Key West,
he has a way of sounding silly."
If,
however, the failures of Heming–
way "in his own character" were apparent to the practitioners of
this critical tradition, they did not want Hemingway's virtues-the
something "hard" and "disturbing." Indeed, they were in a critical
tradition that did not want artists at all ;
it
wanted "men," recruits,
and its apologists were delighted to enlist Hemingway in his own
character, with all his confusions and naivety, simply because Heming–
way had now declared himself on the right side.
And so when
To Have And Have Not
appeared, one critic of
the Left, grappling with the patent fad that the "artist" had failed,
yet determined to defend the "man" who was his new ally, had no
recourse save to explain that in this case failure was triumph because
artistic fumbling was the mark of Hemingway's attempt to come to
grips with the problems of modern life which were as yet too great for
his
art
to encompass. Similarly, another critic of the Left, faced with
the aesthetic inferiority of Hemingway's first play, takes refuge
in
praising the personal vindication which the "man" has made by
"taking sides against fascism." In other words, the "man" has been
a sad case and long in need of regeneration; the looseness of thought
and emotion, the easy and
unin~eresting
idealism of
th~
social feelings
to which Hemingway now gives such sudden and literal expression are
seen as the grateful signs of a personal reformation.
But the disinterested reader does not have to look very deep to
see that Hemingway's social feelings, whatever they may yet become,
are now the occasion for indulgence in the "man". His two recent
failures are failures not only in form but in feeling; one looks at
To Have And Have Not
and
The Fifth Column,
one looks at their
brag, and their disconcerting forcing of the emotions, at their down–
right priggishness, and then one looks at the criticism which, as I con–
ceive it, made these failures possible by demanding them and which
now accepts them so gladly, and one
is
tempted to reverse the whole
liberal-radical assumption about literature. One almost wishes to say
to an author like Hemingway, "You have no duty, no responsibility.
Literature, in a political sense,
is
not in the least important. Wherever
the sword
is
drawn it is mightier than the pen. Whatever you can do
as a man, you can win no wars as an artist."
Very obviously this would not be the whole truth, yet saying it
might counteract the crude and literal theory of art to which,
in
varying measure, we have all been training ourselves for a decade.
