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LESLIE FIEDLER
books and T.V. That they did not manage to see each other before
Cooper died seemed to the press (and to me) a more than minor disaster,
mitigated perhaps by ·the fact that the one did not long survive the
other. And like everyone else, I was moved by Hemingway's telegram
offering Cooper odds of two to one that he would "beat him to the barn."
Death had presided over their association from the start, since their
strongest link was Robert Jordan, invented by one, played by the other :
the Westerner as fighter for Loyalist Spain, the anti-Fascist cowboy, the
Montana innocent in a West turned oddly political and complex, a land
ravaged not by the conflict of outlaw and sheriff but by the struggle
between Communist and Nazi. In such a West, what can the Western
Hero do but-clespite the example of his immortal prototypes-die?
Unlike the War for the American West, the War in Spain was lost by
Our Side; and finally only its dead seemed true heroes. H emingway's
vision in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
is something less than tragic ; but his
self-pity
is
perhaps more adequate than tragedy itself to an age unsure
of who its heroes are or what it would like to do with them.
Only a comic view could have been truer to our times, and this
Hemingway notoriously lacks. He never knew how funny the Westerner
had come to seem in our world, whether played by Roy Rogers or Cooper
or Hemingway himself--only how sad. Of all his male leads, Jake
Barnes comes closest to being redeemed from self-pity by humor-the
humor implicit in his comic wound. And consequently J ake could no
more have been played by Cooper than could the Nick Adams of the
earliest stories, or the old men of the last books. Never quite young,
Cooper was not permitted to grow really old--only to betray his age
and suffering through the non-commital Montana mask. He represents
ideally the protagonists of Hemingway's middle novels, Lieutenant Henry
and, of course, Jordan; but he will not do for anything in
To Have and
To Have Not,
a depression book and, therefore, an ill-conceived sport
sufficient unto Humphrey Bogart. The roles on either side of middle age,
Hemingway was able to play himself, off the screen yet in the public
eye: the beautiful young man of up to twenty-three with his two hun–
dred and thirty-seven wounds, the old stud with his splendid beard and
his guns chased in silver. We cannot even remember the face of his
middle years (except as represented by Cooper), only the old-fashioned
photographs of the youth who became the "Papa" of cover-stories in
Look
and
Life:
his own doomed father, his own remotest ancestor as
well as ours.
At any rate, it was a pilgrimage we contemplated, my colleague and
I, leaving Missoula some twenty-five years after the fictional departure
