ONE LAW
FOR
THE
LION
545
conscious and probably the most completely patronizing letter ever
I
written.
He spoke of the book as something fatal to me. He had, he
said,
written it on an impulse, taking only six weeks to do it. It
was
intended to bring to an end, once and for all, the notion
there
w~
any worth in my work. This, he said, was a thing he had
hated doing, because of his personal regard for me, and he had
done it in the interest of literature. Literature, I was to understand,
was
bigger than either of us.
An impulse lasting six weeks
is
something more than an
impulse.
The Torrents of Spring
is the second book of a young
and already acclaimed writer, whose time and energy might have
been more profitably spent. How explain it? Momentary aber–
rations find their release in letters and cafe brawls.
The Torrents
of Spring
is a sustained, carefully planned, and extremely clever
effort of annihilation. On the evidence Hemingway felt com–
pelled to clear the field of the only competition he considered
serious.
It
is
not the act, to put it charitably, of a self-reliant
man.
It is the skillfully tactical ploy of a man who is scared.
Not of lions and bulls or buffaloes, but of competitors. He took
this shot at Anderson from ambush with serious intent to bring
him
down. Hemingway the sportsman? This too, apparently, on
his·
own terms:
In "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" we find this comment-
He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them [the
rich] and how he had started a story once that began, "The very
rich
are different from you and me." And how some one had said
to
Julian, Yes they have more money.
At that moment poor Julian, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was poor
indeed. Hemingway's books are ornamented and flawed with
witty asides, meant to be lethal, dealing with selected friends
and foes. Fitzgerald, his friend, was a stricken, burdened man,
with a few years to live. Was
poor Julian
designed to cheer him
up?
The impartiality with which Hemingway would deal with
