SSG
WRIGHT MORRIS
ago,
in
The Territory Ahead,
I made my peace with
this
styk
in
these terms:
When the young man Hemingway came to the edge of the
clearing, when he saw what man had left
in
the place of nature,
he found it something more than an unpleasant shock. He found it
unacceptable. In that judgment he has never wavered. It
is
ex·
pressed with finality in his exile. In this feeling, and
in
his exile,
he is not alone, but being an artist he has been able to give
his
judgment a singular permanence. As the style of Faulkner grew
out of his rage-out of the impotence of his rage-the style of
Hemingway grew out of the depth and nuance of his disenchant·
ment. Only a man who had believed, with a child's purity of faith,
in some haunting dream of life, in its vistas of promise, is capable
of forging his disillusion into a work of art. It is love of life that
Hemingway's judgment of life reveals. Between the lines of his
prose, between the passage and the reader, there is often that far
sound of running water, a pine-scented breeze that blows from a
cleaner and finer world. It is this air that makes the sight of so
many corpses bearable. Invariably it is there-a higher order than
the one we see before us in operation-as if the legend of the past
were stamped, like a signature, on his brow. We have never had a
more resolute moralist. A dream of the good life haunts the scene
of all the bad life he so memorably observes, and when under
his
spell it is the dream of the good life that we possess. For such an
artist, should there be anything but praise? Could there be anything
conceivably impotent about such a style? It is when we come to
brood on his consistency--on the man who does not change, or
seem aware of it-that we see that the author, as well as the
reader, has been under a spell, the same spell-the spell of a style.
The consistency lies
in
what the style will permit him to think, to
leel, and to say.
. . .This style-like the clear water that flows at the heart of
all of his fiction---sounds the note of enchantment to the very dis·
enchantment it anticipates. The reader grasps, immediately, that
this man
is
not so tough as he looks. Quite the contrary, he looks
and sounds so tough because his heart is so soft. Behind the armor
of his prose, the shell of his exile, lurks our old friend Huck Finn,
