340
PARTISAN REVIEW
enon, Fenichel coins a startling word: 'primitivation.''' This is
how
Mr. Young deals with the repetitiveness and bare recital of facts
in
such stories as "Big Two-Hearted River." There is a repetition-compul–
sion in Hemingway, and he is the poet of the crippled state in which
men survive the heavy blows of fortune, the mutilations of war, the
cruelties of women. Wounded and broken, they somehow mend;
the
hero establishes an economy of imagination that frees his muscles,
his
senses and his spirit to accomplish this recovery. There is in Hemingway's
style, contributing to its poetry, a tension that comes from the bearing
at each moment of the greatest burden he can lift. Does his devotion
to purity of style perhaps mean that he will not abandon those "higher
functions" and tries to retain and carry them in this form? He refuses,
I believe, to acknowledge "impoverishment" and intends to win a
full
victory.
The sixth chapter of Mr. Young's book is devoted to an essay on
Huckleberry Finn
and here it seems to me that the argument he makes
is really cockeyed. He claims that Hemingway and the Hemingway
heroes are lineal descendants of Huck Finn. Now he has covered
him–
self somewhat by making a proper distinction between the Hemingway
hero and the Code hero. The Code hero is the soldier or the bull-fighter
or hunter or gambler who has beaten his fear and has learned to
live
by a rule of honor; the other hero, weaker and defective, like Macomber,
envies and imitates the Code hero. In some cases the Code hero initiates
the other, bringing him over the threshold of manhood. In time
the
hero may become Code hero as well. Robert Jordan does so in
For
Whom the Bell Tolls
and dies victoriously in the clear. Of course Huck
Finn is nothing like this hero of the Hemingway Code, but Mr.
YOIllll
would have us believe that Nick Adams or the young Hemingway
ale
his twentieth-century embodiment.
"The epic, national hero, call him Huck or Hemingway, is virile
and all-outdoors, but he is sick," writes Mr. Young. "He is told that
as
an American he does hot 'think,' he has no 'mind.' But after what
he has been through, mind and thought mean misery; his simplicity
is
forced on him and he dares not let it go."
This, I think, is the weakest part of Mr. Young's study. The 1011
of Eden, the vision of death and the birth of knowledge, the beginning
of manhood, these things Huck and Nick Adams do have in common.
But what about the sense of anxiety and of mental toil that pervades
Hemingway's stories? There is nothing like it in
Huckleberry Finn.
Nor
is there any self-assignment to ordeals and labors, nor any test
of
strength like those in Hemingway's books, nor are there Code heroes,
