BOOKS
341
nor exclusive definitions of "the right thing." Hemingway has ambitions
that Huck never had. Mark Twain was not trying to create in Huck a
pattern, whereas Hemingway is forever trying to make his heroes virile
and dominant. They are supposed to be cast
in
the right mold. They
are exemplary; Huck never is that.
Democratic poets, Whitman wrote in
Democratic Vistas,
must
"create a typical personality of character eligible to the uses of the
high average of men"-"to endow a literature with great archetypical
models." There has been a fierce half-hidden struggle in American so–
ciety to establish a typical personality, and in this struggle the poets
have come out poorly. Journalists, soldiers, administrators, movie direc–
tors, and publicity men have pushed them aside. In the last century,
many American statesmen and leaders were also literary men. Lincoln
was a great writer and his original personality was formed under literary
influences. But one of the worst insults in any of Hemingway's books
is
uttered by a woman in
To Have and Have Not:
"You writer!" she
says to her lover. Meaning, of course, "You wrong sort of writer!" or
"Mere writer!" The right sort, like Hemingway, emerges in the struggle
to establish the great archetypical models, to create the mold of man–
hood. No mere writer can do this.
It is plain that Hemingway thinks of himself as a representative
man, one who has had the necessary and qualifying experiences. He has
not been disintegrated by the fighting, the drinking, the wounds, the
turbulence, the glamour, he has not gotten lost in the capitals of the
world, nor has he disappeared in the huge continents, nor has he been
made anonymous within the oceanic human crowd. He keeps the out–
lines of his personality. This is why his characters are so dramatic; they
offer the promise of a strong and victorious identity. But it is strange
that Hemingway's standards, unlike Whitman's, should be such ex–
clusive ones. I suppose that in a game not all can play, Only those
within the spell and within the rules are eligible. Manhood, as Heming–
way views it, must necessarily be the manhood of the few. In
The Old
Man and the Sea
a young boy chooses the fisherman as his symbolic
father. The actual father is not good enough. He is out. The tourist at
the end of the story is out, too. He is not one of those who know. (It's
strange how Hemingway detests tourists. -Other tourists. Every traveler,
I suppose, has felt the enmity of the American who "hit the place first"
and considers himself practically a native.) Now Huck is also initiated
by
a symbolic father but that
is
because of his own Pap's cruelty. Nigger
Jim
qualifies not because he
is
stoical, enduring, resourceful-a Code
hero, in short- but because he loves Huck.
