PARTISAN REVIEW
sacrifice. One is indeed at a loss to imagine what his readings may have
been. Hemingway's point of view has so little in common with the
aesthete's, that occasionally it may even appear strictly utilitarian. He
singles out details of a practical character with the humdrum precision
of the man in the street.
I am quoting extensively from my 1929 article, not because of
the originality of my remarks, but because I presented Hemingway
to the Italian public as an opposite case of whatever they knew
in
the way of narrative art. I tried to convey what D. S. Savage has
said much more forcibly
in
the London literary miscellany
Focus:
"Hemingway is, within very narrow limits, a stylist who has brought
to something like perfection a curt, unemotional, factual style which
is an attempt at the objective presentation of experience. A bare,
dispassionate reporting of external actions is all that Hemingway as
a rule attempts, in presenting
his
characters and incidents. His typical
central character,
his
"I," may be described generally as a bare con–
sciousness stripped to the human minimum, impassively recording
the objective data of experience. He has no contact with ideas, no
visible emotions, no hopes for ,the future, and no memory. He is,
as far as it is possible to be so, a
de-personalized
being." These words
express admirably what I wanted to convey to a public of Italian wri–
ters and readers, steeped in the delicious sea of Proust. I did not try to
see behind the
fa~ade,
to reveal what view of life was behind that
de-personalized style. This has been done, however, in Mr. Savage's
essay, where he shows how the entire extrusion of personality
into the outward sensational world makes Hemingway's characters
the inwardly-passive victims of a meaningless determinism; how the
profound spiritual inertia, the inner vacuity and impotence which is
a mark of all Hemingway's projected characters, ends in a deadening
sense of boredom and negation which can only be relieved by vio–
lent, though still essentially meaningless, activity; how the final up–
shot of it all is the total absence of a sense of life, so that life is
brought into a sensational vividness only by contrast with the nullity
of death.
I did not try to see through Hemingway's world; what interested
me was the aspect hinted at in these words of Savage: "A novelist,
of admitted literary merit, who lacks all the equipment generally
expected of a practitioner of his art except a certain artistic scrupu-
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