546
WRIGHT MORRIS
a friend, as well as a foe, is not one of the symptoms of self–
reliance. He is still strafing the field of competitors. On the
evidence self-reliance may be part of the man on the safari,
and part of the legend, but not a part of the author of
The
Torrents of Spring.
In the man there
is
more than sufficient to
support a respectable legend, but we do not need the legend
to respect the man-only the superman.
He would be the champ, and by 1932 he was.
Death
in
the Afternoon
is
many things, it contains the best and the worst
of the writer, and it finds
him
at the moment he stands at the
summit of
his
world.
The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and
hear and learn and understand; and write when there
is
something
that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.
Was there a writer alive in whose ears these words did not
ring? Perhaps two. Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein. Just
a few months later Gertrude Stein issued her own version of old
worlds conquered, putting the record, and her readers, straight
on many things. One was Ernest Hemingway. Alice B. Toklas
tells us:-
Hemingway had been formed by the two of them [Stein and Ander–
son] and they were both a little proud and a little ashamed of the
work of their minds. . . . They admitted that Hemingway was
yellow, he
is,
Gertrude Stein insisted, just like the flat-boat men
on the MissiSsippi river described by Mark Twain.
Hemingway
yellow? The malice of Stein's attack is obvious,
but she did not throw her barbs at random, or merely tip them
with venom. The wounded lion did not roar. The buffalo did
not paw the ground. Perhaps it was not the injustice of the attack
that led Hemingway to ignore it. He knew his adversary was
his
master at this sort of cape work, and he had been the first
to
strike a low blow. Without excuse or provocation he had attacked
a friend, Sherwood Anderson.
