HEMINGWAY
397
arguing in a tongue not my own against what I took to
be
the uncritical
Italian veneration of Hemingway; and I was shouting my protest to
one of those young writers from Rome or Palermo or Milan who write
in
translated Hemingwayese about hunting and
grappa
and getting
laid-but who have no sense of the night-time religious anguish which
makes Hemingway a more Catholic writer than most modern Italians.
"Yes," I remembered saying, "yes-sometimes he puts down the closest
thing to silence attainable
in
words, but often what he considers reticence
is
only the garrulousness of the inarticulate." This I hoped at least I
was managing to say.
What really stirred in me on that long blue ride into dusk and
the snowless valley (there was near dismay
in
the shops and cares since
the season was at hand and no snow had fallen) was an old resentment
at those, chiefly but not exclusively Europeans, unable to understand
that Hemingway was to
be
hated and loved not merely as a special
American case, but more particularly as a Western writer, even as an
imaginary Montanan. It seemed only fair that revolutions and illness
and time bring him to Sun Valley to die, to the western slopes of
America, rather than to Spain or Africa or Cuba; and it was scarcely
ironical that his funeral be held in a tourists' haven, a place where the
West sells itself to all comers.
Hemingway never wrote a book set in the mountain West, but he
wrote none in which innocence and nobility, heroism and cowardice,
devotion and passion (not love but
aficion)
are not defined as they
are in the T.V. Westerns which beguile a nation. The West he exploited
is the West not of geography but of our dearest and most vulnerable
dreams, not a locale but a fantasy, whose meanings do not change when
it is called Spain or Africa or Cuba. As long as the hunting and fishing
is
good. And the women can be left behind. In
Gary
Cooper, all at
which Hemingway merely hinted was made explicit; for Cooper was
what Hemingway only longed to be, the West made flesh-his face,
in
its inarticulate blankness, a living equivalent of Hemingway'S prose style.
It is not at all odd to find a dramatist and a favorite actor col–
laborating in the creation of character and image; what Tennessee
Williams imagines, for instance, Marlon Brando is---or has obligingly
become. But a similar collaboration between novelist and actor seems
to me unparallelled in literary history-a little strange, though in this
case inevitable. How aptly the paired deaths of Cooper and Heming–
way, each greeted as a national calamity, climaxed and illuminated
their relationship, their joint role in sustaining on upper cultural levels
an image of our character and fate common enough in pulps, comic
