ONE LAW FOR THE LION
There is evidence that Stein's verbal shrapnel hurt Heming–
way more, and stayed with him longer, than that he received on
the Italian front. Under the buffalo hide he was both tender and
vulnerable. A lasting preference for men of action, rather than
words, dates from this verbal mawling-gc;>od drinking, good
shooting, and good fishing companions. Good writers are out.
Such self-reliance is another form of exile-he had the verbal
shooting range to
himself.
He was the champ, in competition
with
himself.
At this point we remember that shadow-boxing
was one of his favorite pastimes. At parties, especially. It was
dead men, as he said in
Esquire,
that one had to beat.
Self-parody, in both his life and his art, are the fruits of
the last decade. The man who entered the trees across the river
never fully emerged from E. B. White's bar across the street.
He is all but invisible in the recent pages of
Life. The Torrents of
Spring,
in which he served notice on his friend, Sherwood Ander–
son, is as nothing to the notice
The Dangerous Summer
served
on Ernest Hemingway, author of
Death in the Afternoon
and
other
books.
In
a
letter to Maxwell Perkins he said that he had "not been
at
all hardboiled since July 8, 1918-on the night of which I
discovered that that also was vanity."
In
Men
at
War:
... I had a bad time until I figured it out that nothing could
happen to me that had not happened to all men before me.
In
A Farewell to Arms:
If
people bring so much courage to this world the world has
to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world
breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken
places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good
and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.
If
you are
none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there
will
be
no special hurry.
