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PARTISAN REVIEW
experi ence tha t promised LO separa te me from the commo n fa te even
tho ugh I suspected even then tha t hi s experi ence and hi s prose had
already been frozen in ludi cro us pos turing. " Yo u come ri ght down to
it," a wo uld-be writer fri end o f mine, a lso seventeen , sa id to me, " not
even Hemingway can be Hemingway." - A lesson res isted even as
sentence was prono unced . And yet, I kn ew it was an accura te assess–
ment, as accura te as anything I have since read abo ut the man . In no
o ther writer, a t leas t in no other writer I had read to tha t po int in my
life, d id a rt and life so fi ercely impinge on one ano ther, so tha t the
payment for the one in evitabl y demanded the mytho logizing o f the
o ther. Ultima tely, he became too successful to susta in the myths. And
he left too man y debts in his wake, LOOman y of us whom he fo rced
to
face the limita tio ns o f hi s life in the erroneous beli ef th a t he had
consequ entl y freed us from the necessity o f facin g the limita tion s
or
o ur own .
From the beginning, then , Hemingway could no t be the Heming–
way we thought we wanted . Long befo re hi s actua l dea th , the reputa–
tion o f Hemingway the writer had begun to wane. In po in t o f fact, the
criti cal assa ult began with hi s emergence in the 1920s. And from the
first, his persona lity, as much a hi s prose, was the center o f contention .
In the literary hi era rchy o f reputation s, Hemingway's case is important
because so many critics instinctively understood tha t central to the
achi evement of Hemingway the writer was the ques ti on of Hemingway
the man. In thi s respect, a t least, he is mo re comparable to a writer such
as Celine than he is to mos t o f hi s Ameri can contempo rari e . T aken
together, hi s a rt and life refl ect a man who saw himse lf as a
poete
maudit,
but a
poete maudit
on a gargantuan sca le. The controll ed tone
o f the earl y p rose masks an ambition so ferocio us th at it makes one,
even LOday , wince a t th e di sguises and counter-disguises the man had to
crea te and then learn to live with . Even in hi s posthumously publi shed
memoria l to his Pa ri s days,
A Moveable Feast,
we discover the precise
measurements o f a prose- as fin e a p rose as its autho r had possessed
since the period about which he was now writing-des igned not LO
enclose hi s memo ri es of a world but to settl e scores. T he man we meet
here scoring po ints off the bodies o f Fo rd Madox Ford and Gertrude
Stein has ca refull y sealed off his rea l past. He is, as ado lescents say,
"gelling hi s own ba k," creating a po rtrait in whi ch memo ry rejects
true intimacy to serve vengeance.
A
Moveable Feast
sweeps the pas t
clean of o bstacl es tha t threa ten Hemingway the man . Fea rful o f the
dimensions o f hi s own failure, he withdrew into the hard co re o f a
being he himse lf con scio usly fashio ned: A
man ,
an American man ,
