Leonard Kriegel
HEMINGWAY'S RITES OF MANHOOD
"It
takes a pretty good man
to
make any sense when he's dying."
Hemingway to Lillian Ross
I
Like children intent on claiming maturity, cultures turn
against the heroes they themselves create. And they turn with a
vengeance, as if what remained in the balance were not the validity of
the hero but the ability of the culture
to
see itself as valid. The need to
destroy, or at least reduce in stature, those who can no longer serve is a
tendency of most cultures; in American culture, it seems an inevitabil–
ity, part of the process by which we declare what is fashionable or
unfashionable. Whether by his own design or through the lack of more
attractive alternatives, the writer remains the culture's mirror. And in
no other writer of the twentieth century-not in Fitzgerald, not even in
Faulkner-has American culture seen the reflection of its own uncer–
tainties better than in what it first made and then unmade of Ernest
Hemingway.
That Hemingway is no longer fashionable is by now a cliche.
Even those for whom he served as model are bound to find him boring
if they go back to read him, as I recently did, without the youthful
expectations he inspired. Few major writers have fallen so quickly
from favor. Or so far.
It
is almost as if the survival of the man's memory
has had to seek an excuse, a justification, while the writer is avoided,
dealt with, when he is dealt with at all, through formal academic
criticism which, no matter how perceptive, parodies the very promise
he made to us when we were young. Today, those of the young whp
still want to be writers do not usually read him. Not, certainly, with the
kind of passionate intensity with which I first read him in 1950, when I
was seventeen and Hemingway's was a voice I could confidently adopt
as a model: part-precursor, part-prophet, an echo of the kind of
