5....
WRIGHT MORRIS
at his desk, the man who went four rounds with Braddock, or
the old man, the big fish, and the sea?
A memorable but characteristic economy dictates these suc–
cessive fashions. We may be amused, or shocked, but we need
not apologize. This too is
style-as
unchanging as
his
style. The
personality of Hemingway cannot be isolated from the man who
wrote the books, or the man who is the legend-the authority of
one resides in the other. He is all of a piece. The personality cult
of a mass-cult age may use this image as we use brand labels,
but that is our problem before it is his.
Some thirty years ago Laura Riding made
this
comment-
More and more the poet has been made to conform to literature
instead of literature to the poet-literature being the name given
by criticism to works inspired or obedient to criticism. Less and
Jess is the poet permitted to rely on personal authority. The very
word genius, formerly used to denote the power to intensify a
sense of life into a sense of literature, has been boycotted
by
criticism; not so much because it has become gross and meaning–
less through sentimentality as because professional literature de–
velops a shame of the person, a snobbism against the personal self–
reliance which is the nature of genius.
There was no shame of the person in Hemingway. Personal
self-reliance seems to be both the hallmark of the man and the
legend. That is good. But is it what Hemingway had?
On
the
escutcheon of his self-reliance, along with bulls, fish, and other
heraldic symbols, are cryptic signs as well as curious blemishes.
Battle scars? We have to look at the record.
The most curious example of Hemingway's talent
is
a
novella,
The Torrents of Spring,
a burlesque-parody of the style
of Sherwood Anderson. An older man, Anderson had been
his
friend and benefactor. Why did the young lion, the buffalo, tum
on him? In his memoirs Anderson tells us this:
I got a letter from Hemingway.
This
after he had written and
published
The Torrents of Spring.
It was certainly the most self-
