ERNEST HEMINGWAY
55
We have conceived the artist to be a man perpetually on the spot,
who must always report to us his precise moral and political latitude
and longitude. Not that for a moment we would consider shaping our
own political ideas by his; but we who of course tum for political
guidance to neWspapers, theorists, or historians, create the fiction that
thousands-not, to be sure, ourselves-are waiting on the influence
of the creative artist, and we stand by to see if he is leading us as he
properly should. We consider then that we have exalted the impor–
tance of art, and perhaps we have. But in doing so we, have quite
forgotten how complex and subtle art is and, if it is to be "used", how
very difficult it is to use it.
One feels that Hemingway would never have thrown himself
into his new and inferior work if the necessity had not been put upoq
him
to justify himself before this magisterial conception of literature.l
Devoted to literalness, the critical tradition of the Left took Heming–
way's symbols for his intention, saw in his stories only cruelty or vio–
lence or a calculated indifference, and turned upon him a barrage of
high-mindedness---:that liberal-radical highmindedness that is increas–
ingly taking the place of thought among the "progressive professional
and middle class forces" and that now, under the name of "good will"
shuts out half the world. Had it seen what was actually in Heming–
way's work, it would not have forced him out of his idiom of the
artist and into the idiom of the man which he speaks with difficulty
and without truth.
For what should have been always obvious is that Hemingway
is
a writer who, when he writes as an "artist", is passionately and
aggressively concerned with truth and even with social .truth. And
with this in mind, one
mig~t
begin the consideration of his virtues
with a glance at Woodrow Wilson. Hemingway has said that all
genuine American writing comes from the prose of Huckleberry Finn's
voyage down the Mississippi and certainly his own starts there. But
Huck's prose is a sort of moral symbol. It is the antithesis to the
Widow Douglas-to the pious, the respectable, the morally plausible.
It
is the prose of the free man seeing the world as it really is. And
Woodrow Wilson was, we might say, Hemingway's Widow Douglas.
To the sensitive men who went to war it was not, perhaps, death and
destruction that made the disorganizing shock. It was perhaps rather
that death and destruction went on at the instance and to the accom–
paniment of the fine grave words, of which Woodrow Wilson's
speeches were the finest and gravest. Here was the issue of liberal
theory;
here in the bloated or piecemeal corpse was the outcome of
the
words of humanitarianism and ideals; this was the work of pre–
IIJI'Iably careful men of good will, learned men, polite men. The
