430
PARTISAN REVIEW
built of poured concrete
to
last two hundred years, an ideal buttress
against the world, and as safe a refuge as could be found for a
paranoid.
It
lacked only catwalks and an electrified fence
to
be as
secure as Trotsky's redoubt in Mexico.
A brave passage for a son
to
write. Inevitably, however, one wishes that
Hemingway himself, for one moment before he pulled the trigger of
the most famous shotgun in American literary history, had paused to
frame a sentence in which he told us what he had learned of the failure
of heroism, the inadequacy of courage, a sentence into which he
managed
to
put all that he now knew about the terror of being a man,
of not measuring up. In this world, at least, each of us is consumed by
the energies set loose by his own failures. But we always expect
something more of our teachers. And we deserve more. Or at least one
would like to think so.
