456
This type of minimal statement
in Hemingway goes very far to–
ward forgetting that thoughts, fan–
tasies, memories, projects, the con–
stant inner monologue and the un–
spoken conversations among people
are also facts in the world, facts
of being human. That we think
defines our humanity. We are re–
membering, reasoning, political
creatures, constantly responding to
others and constantly willing our–
selves into relation with others.
Eliminate these actions in the
guise of objective reporting and
the writer eliminates the properly
human, just as at the opposite ex–
treme, in the precious and pri–
vate writer, he eliminates social
meaning by signifying nothing but
his own obsession. The force of an
obsession cannot be communicat–
ed; the obsessed person clings to
his loneliness. Hemingway's com–
pulsion toward objectivity links
him
with the obsessively subjec–
tive writer: they both fail to give
us sufficient criteria for judgment,
sufficient material for a full par–
ticipation in the life of large hu–
man beings. They bind their pro–
jections of men in action to limited
conceptions of the possibilities of
being human.
Obviously, however, Heming–
way has found an adequate stance
for expressing the sadness of the
basically uncommunicative soul
and for giving glory to its instants
of lonely courage. When he de–
picts the isolated man, he knows
whereof he speaks and the sim-
plistic prose manner which he
derives from Gertrude Stein serves
him well. (He was a nice boy, a
good pupil, she notes maliciously.)
He describes a static condition,
not an act of becoming. His "mo–
ments of truth" are plateaus. The
consequence of revelation is a for–
tified stoic acceptance of mortali–
ty. He gives us a partial truth
about the human condition.
Why then does so much of his
work make us feel like a rainy
Sunday afternoon? What depresses
us finally is this vision of human
possibility-one of violent com–
partmentalization, strict limits, and
no growth possible. On the occa–
sions when he seeks to express a
sense of people coming meaning–
fully together, he falls into an em–
barrassing purple rhetoric, as in the
sleeping-bag scenes of
For Whom
the Bell Tolls
or in the biography
of the battered old love-hungry
soldier in
Across the River and
Into the Trees.
This is not to
derogate his great achievement,
the one which is responsible for
his popularity and his enduring
projection of an aspect of life in
the twentieth century. From begin–
ning to end, he has spun out a
continuous moral romance about
the lonely man striving for dignity,
grace, and compassion within a
world populated by real sharks
and imaginary tender boys and
girls.
The Cataloguers:
John O'Hara
is a good example. They observe.
They make the discovery of the
