542
WRIGHT MORRIS
than ten years earlier he had let drop that the
Big
one was in a
bank vault in Cuba-this Big one was his ace in the hole. How
well it tells us that what he was doing, in his own opinion, was
not enough.
It
is not like a man-a man like Hemingway-to
let his
Big
fish trail under water while he stands on the pier,
empty-handed, with his arms outstretched. In the fable of the
old man and the sea the moral may be more pointed than we
imagined-his tormenting self-doubt more justified than we
would believe.
With luck, courage, and great talent, a man's life might
prove to be of some interest, but seldom as interesting as his
death. With death his life is something more than the sum of its
parts. The parts of Hemingway are memorable and the world
has waited for a verdict. How well he knew the ways of the
world! Even the young man from Oak Park would have told
us that death joins more than it tears asunder, and that it is
harder to kill a legend than a man.
Of the parts of Hemingway, man, writer, and legend, the
writer is vulnerable. He tells us--
So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you
feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after....
and
I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things,
and one of the simplest things of all and most fundamental is violent
death.
Mter the lessons of writing were over what led him to seek
out war, the safari, the calculated risk? Was it for raw material,
or is there a hint that he would welcome death-as he did life–
on his own terms? The age questions everything, answers noth–
ing, and he gave these unanswered questions their style.
Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or haIlow were obscene
beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the
names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
