598
DWIGHT MACDONALD
("the flag of permanent defeat" fairly nudges us to sympath–
ize). And all those "ands."
Undefeated
is 57 pages long, as against
Old Man's 140,
but not only does much more happen in it but
also
one feels
that more has happened than is expressed, so to speak, while
Old Man
gives the opposite impression.
Undefeated
has four
people in it, each with a name and each defined through
his
words and actions;
Old Man
has no people, just two Eternal,
Universal types. Indeed, for three-fourths it has only one, since
The Boy doesn't go along on the fishing trip. Perhaps a Kafka
could have made something out of it, but in Hemingway's
realistic manner it is monotonous. "Then he began to pity the
great fish"-that sort of thing. At times the author, rather
desperate one imagines, has
him
talk to the fish and to the
birds. He
also
talks to
his
hand: "How does it go, hand?" In
Undefeated,
the emotion
arises
naturally out of the dialogue
and action, but in
Old Man,
since there's little of either, the
author has to spell it out. Sometimes he reports the fisherman's
improbable musings: "He is a great fish and I must convince
him, he thought. . . . Thank God, they are not as intelligent
as we who kill them, although they are more noble and more
able." Sometimes the author tips us off: "He was too simple to
wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had
attained it." (A humble man who knows he has attained humil–
ity seems to me a contradiction in terms.) This constant editorial–
izing-an elementary sin against which I used to warn my Crea–
tive Writing
cl~
at Northwestern University--<:ontrasts oddly
with the stripped, no-comment method that made the young
Hemingway famous. "I am a strange old man," the hero tells
The Boy. Prove it, old man, don't say it.
Our Town
is
an extraordinarily skillful bit of craftsman–
ship. I think it is practically actor-proof, which
is
why it is
so
often given by local dramatic societies. With that literary
sensibility which has enabled him to fabricate each of his
books
in a different mode, a miracle of imitative versatility; Mr.
