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PARTISAN REVIEW
extent, his response to the America of Eisenhower bears a certain
resemblance to Hemingway's response to the America of Woodrow
Wilson. As many critics have pointed out, Hemingway's prose was
generated by the wish to liberate language from the fine lying rhe–
toric in which Wilsonian idealism had cloaked the horrid realities
of the First World War; like the personal style Hemingway elaborated
in his stories-the code of courage and craft in the face of a con–
stantly threatening universe-the prose style itself was the expression
of an effort to establish a truth of human experience that would be
proof against the distorting encrustations of "culture" and "civiliza–
tion," a truth (as it were) of the state of nature, a truth at rock–
bottom. But the difference between Hemingway and the Hipster is
the difference between mastering a bad situation and being victimized
by it, between exercising intelligence, sensibility, and discipline in or–
der to overcome the rot of history and seizing upon the rot of history
as an excuse for resigning from the painful responsibility to exercise
the mind at all.
If
it is true that Mailer has been reading things into Hip that are
simply not there-and just those things that Hip would need to
satisfy his demand for size and importance and a sense of huge pos–
sibility-then we can be fairly certain that sooner or later his rest–
less imagination wiII light out for some other territory. Indeed, he
has already shown signs of an impulse to drop his original emphasis
on the political significance of Hip in favor of what he takes to be
its theological implications. The idea, apparently, is that God is "no
longer" omnipotent and therefore needs the help of man to fuIfiII
the "enormous destiny" with which He has been charged (by whom
Mailer does not say) . Here is how he put it spontaneously to an
interviewer:
.. . I think that the particular God we can conceive of is a god whose
relationship to the universe we cannot divine; that is, how enormous He
is in the scheme of the universe we can't begin to say. But almost cer–
tainly, He is not all-powerful; He exists as a warring element in a di–
vided universe, and we are a part of-perhaps the most important part
-of His great expression, His enormous destiny; perhaps He is trying
to impose upon the universe His conception of being against other con–
ceptions of being very much opposed to His. Maybe we are in a sense
the seed, the seed-carriers, the voyagers, the explorers, the embodiment
