878
PAR.TISAN REVIEW
it
possible, Hemingway of all American writers is the closest to Kafka.
Like Kafka, he gets his strongest and most characteristic effects by a
perverse tone of innocence: "They shot the six cabinet ministers at
half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital." ("Waking
one morning from troubled dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself
changed in his bed to a monstrous insect.") Like Kafka, he exercises
sometimes an almost magical power over his readers, and, in the ap–
parent ease with which he can be imitated, constitutes a dangerous
temptation to other writers. Hemingway is the more accessible of the
two because the premises on which he works are more popular, but the
cult of Hemingway, though it numbers its adherents in the hundred
thousands, is in its way no less esoteric than the cult of Kafka. Both
Hemingway and Kafka belong to the small class of writers, not neces–
sarily the greatest, who by the purity and brilliance of their technique
transform the universe.
For such a writer, language-his own particular language-is every–
thing. Let him for a moment cease to care about the precise weight of
each word that he sets down, let him indicate by the smallest gesture
that he may not be entirely in earnest, that the words are not really
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