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PARTISAN REVIEW
the trout stream in
The Sun A Lso Rises,
Hemingway shrinks from his
purpose. He was unable
to
make the self indistinguishable from the
self's world. The inadequacies of his characters pull and scratch at him.
They are all attitudes, poses, heavy wooden statues carved by a sculptor
for whom mass must disguise a lack of individuation. Colonel Cant–
well, Thomas Hudson, the patent falsity of these personas subsumes
even the prose. And the results are devastating. Take, for example,
IsLands in the Stream,
apparently the last book which Hemingway
pushed to completion (although, in fairness to him, he was evidently
never ready to see it published). One might argue that it reads, at least
in some of its parts, fairly well. The novel contains bursts of true
descriptive power, particularly when Hemingway creates the sea or the
beaches. And the power is made even greater by the sense of loss
inherent in what they force one to remember-the Hemingway of
In
Our Time
and
The Sun A Lso Rises,
for whom a single sentence could
be made to carry so much authority that its author might legitimately
claim
to
be a master. For the most part, however, the prose is flaccid
and weak-willed, exposing some vital flaw in its author.
In
fact, the
only way
IsLands in the Stream
makes ense is if we read it as a series of
tired reflections on manhood by a writer whose deepest resources have
finally betrayed him. The book parodies not the work of the past but
the past of the man.
Of all of Hemingway's heroes, Thomas Hudson is the most
artificial. One is tempted to call him pompous. He is also as peripheral
to the action as any of Hemingway's fictional embodiments, an unreal
figure limited by the very qualities which Hemingway had begun to
dispense as philosophical anodynes. Thomas Hudson's courage is
taken for granted, yet the reader never understands why; his sense of
identity is never established, since Hemingway apparently assumed
that the reader would take the Hudson-Hemingway collation for
granted, as he himself obviously did; and the affection, even reverence,
that the other characters in the novel feel for him seems to have no basis
in anything that the reader sees. Even the self as philosopher-father
demands fictional life. For the writer, nothing can be assumed - one of
the lessons that the early Hemingway himself taught. But Thomas
Hudson is simply there, like the sun. And the only abiding interest his
character possesses is autobiographica l.
IsLands in the Stream
can only
live as an extension of its author's life. For it is the life, and the life
alone, through which Hemingway attempts
to
justify this fiction.
But readers have grown too conscious, both of Hemingway's
limitations and of Thomas Hudson's.
In
no other novel does Heming-
