LEONARD KRIEGEL
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way seem quite so much the prisoner of his past. He is still the doctor's
son, and the boundaries he long since set for the experiences he was
willing to absorb have pinched his work tightly, shrivelled and dried it
and accentuated the sagging flesh. In the long run , the life, too, would
no longer exert power over the imaginations of others. What he
permitted himself to see was what he gave us. The virtues he extolled
'have not outlasted him. In the end, he was imprisoned by a mind for
which evil was so visible that it lacked diabolism. And so he substituted
eiegy for the severity of the writer's true task, to stand and observe the
two-edged nature of evil, to seek out its ambiguities, to speak to our
manhood out of all the tawdry mess and squander he himself was
going to leave in his wake. As inadequate as Thomas Hudson is, one
might then have touched the man behind him.
However, the man had gone under, probably even before he
created Thomas Hudson. "The legitimate fear of chaos" had been
turned into self-promotion. There are ways to set Hemingway's story
right. One wishe that near the end he had been able to seize hold of his
own very fragmentary being and write about that brittle edge of macho
in which proving one's manhood is the self's true desperation. And not
a quiet desperation at that, but one that sent him baying at the moon.
For the manhood trial is never over, never complete, and manhood is
never really won. One suspects that Hemingway might have written
about that as no one else before him had done. Having come through
those formidable early years and having transformed himself into an
advertisement for the self's ambition even as his talent dwindled, he
might yet have written a novel so naked in its judgment and so final in
the quality of its desperation that the snide remarks about his capaci–
ties might read today as parodies of their own emptiness. Instead, he
eliminated all hints of vulnerability. Never mind that the house was
caving in; he would take his leave as a man and refuse to admit the
imminence of catastrophe.
It
was no longer pride that sustained him at the end, just paranoid
fantasies of federal agents swooping out of the Idaho mountains to
seize what remained of his privacy, his money, the struggles and secrets
that he had banked in his mind like a miser. Africa and Spain and Paris
in the twenties-all were
to
disappear in what his son calls "Fort
Hemingway." The symbolic curve has brought him into the harshest
isolation of his life. Fort Hemingway stands over its owner, the
immense symbol of his life's end.
It had been purchased early in his illness, but seemed to presage it.
Set well back from the road, it was an almost bunkerlike blockhouse,
