551
ONE
LAW
FOR THE LION
American dreamer,. the
cl~an-cut
boy who just wishes Aunt Sally
would leave him alone, who wants nothing more, nor less, than
a clearing of his own in the wilderness. The dream itself he left
unchanged, he merely moved to a smaller river, but he brought
to it a style that revealed the dream to itself.
. . . In the interests of this style things remain as they are,
they do not change. It is a lens of the finest precision; it records,
accurately, the author's field of vision, but the price of the per–
formance is that the
field
must remain the same. Time-in the
sense of development-must stand still. The timeless quality of the
Hemingway snapshot is truly timeless-growth and change have
been removed. The illusion of things as they are is raised to a point
that has seldom been equaled; a frieze-like sense of permanence
enshrines the Big Two-Hearted River and its world-wide tributaries.
.. . Good fish and running water serve him as the means of coming
to terms with life.
With such a writer, appraisal and reappraisal never end.
With his death, the man-and with the man, the writing–
grow more complex. He
is
many men, and only a few would
fit into the books the style dictated. That fellow was self-reliant,
self-assured, and
in
spite of his disclaimer, a pretty tough hom–
bre. We shall not soon forget how he looked, and never how
he wrote. But it is little wonder, now the lists are closed, that
he did not write that book Gertrude Stein suggested: the Con–
fessions of Ernest Hemingway. Strange, indeed, that he did not
write it-as he did not write the Big one looming on the horizon
I
-because the function of the style made it impossible. It called
I
for a simpler fellow than Ernest Hemingway actually was..We
t
must come to terms with this composite image for ourselves. On
one point, however, there is no question, we
kno~
a piece of
the continent has fallen, and there is no need to ask for whom
it
is
the bell tolls.
