ERNEST HEMINGWAY
59
whose dramatic tension is so weak; and it seems to me that there
is something even vulgar in making Spain serve as a kind of mental
hospital for disorganized foreigners who, out of a kind of self-con–
tempt, tum to the "ideal of the Spanish people." Nor, finally, can
I think that Hemingway's statement of an anti-fascist position is
of great political importance or of more than neutral virtue. It is
hard to believe that the declaration of anti-fascism is nowadays any
more a mark of sufficient grace in a writer than a declaration against
disease would be in a physician or a declaration against accidents
would be in a locomotive engineer. The admirable intention in itself
is not enough and criticism begins and does not end when the inten–
tion is declared.
But I believe that judgments so simple as these will be accepted
with more and more difficulty. The "progressive professional and
middle class forces" ·are framing a new culture, based on the old
liberal-radical culture but designed now to hide the new anomaly
by which they live their intellectual and emotional lives. For they
must believe, it seems, that imperialist arms advance proletarian
revolution, that oppression by the right people brings liberty. Like
Hemingway's latest hero, they show one front to the world and .
another to themselves, know that within they are true proletarian
men while they wrap themselves in Early American togas; they are
enthralled by their own good will; they are people of fine feelings
and they dare not think lest the therapeutic charm vanish. This is
not a political essay and I am not here concerned with the political
consequences of these things, bad though they be and worse though
they
will
be, but only with the cultural consequences. For to prevent
the anomaly from appearing in its genuine difficulty, emotion-of
a very limited kind-has been apotheosized and thought has been
made almost a kind of treachery; the reviewer of
The Fifth Column
to whom I have already referred cites as a virtue Hemingway's
"unintellectual" partisanship of the Spanish cause. The piety of
"good will" has become enough and Fascism is conceived not as a
force which complicates the world but as a force which simplifies
the world-and so· it does for any number of people of good will
(of a good will not to be doubted, I should say) for whom the
existence of an absolute theological evil makes non-existent any other
evil.
It is this group that has made Hemingway its cultural hero
and for reasons that need not be canvassed very far. Now that Hem–
ingway has become what this group would call "affirmative" he
has become insufficient; but insufficiency is the very thing this group
desires. When Hemingway was in "negation" his themes of courage,
