56
PARTISAN REVIEW
world was a newspaper world, a state-paper world, a memorial speech
world. Words were trundled smoothly o'er the tongue--Coleridge
had said it long ago-
Like mere abstractions, empty sounds to which
We join no feeling and attach no form
As if the soldier died without a wound
...
Passed off to Heaven, translated and not killed.
Everyone in that time had feelings, as they called them; just as
everyone has "feelings" now. And it seems to me that what Heming–
way wanted first to do was to get rid of the "feelings," the comfor–
table liberal humanitarian feelings: and to replace them with the
truth.
Not cynicism, I think, not despair, as so often is said, but this
admirable desire shaped his famous style and his notorious set of ad–
mirations and contempts. The trick of understatement or tangential
statement sprang from this desire. Men had made so many utterances
in such fine language that it had become time to shut up. Heming–
way's people, as everyone knows, are afraid of words and ashamed of
them and the line from his stories which has become famous is the
one that begins "Won't you please," goes on through its innumerable
"pleases" and ends, "stop talking." Not only slain men but slain
words made up the mortality of the war.
Another manifestation of the same desire in Hemingway was his
devotion to the ideal of technique as an end in itself. A great deal
can go down in the tumble but one of the things that stands best is a
l
cleanly done job.
As
John ' Peale Bishop says in his admirable essay
on Hemingway (which yet, I feel, contributes to the general mis–
apprehension
by
asserting the evanescence of Hemingway's "compas–
sion"), professional pride is one of the last things to go. Hemingway
became a devotee of his own
skill
and he exploited the ideal of
skill
in his cha:racters. His admired men always do a good job; and the
proper handling of a rod, a gun, an espada or a pen is a thing, so
Hemingway seems always to be saying, which can be understood
when speech cannot.
This does not mean that Hemingway attacks mind itself, a charge
which has often been brought against him. It is perhaps safe to say
that whenever he seems to be making such an attack, it is not so much
reason
as it is
rationalization
that he resists; "mind" appears simply
as the complex of false feelings. And against "mind" in this sense he
sets up what he believes to be the primal emotions, among others
pain and death, met not with the mind but with techniques and
courage. "Mind" he sees as a kind of castrating knife, cutting off
pro·
