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PARTISAN REVIEW
remains his supreme fiction.
It
is the life which he parades before us,
his selfhood encased in the trappings of the myths America created and
Hemingway tried to live. In retrospect, the public bravado, the pictures
of the great white hunter in
Esquire,
the Broadway friend of WOllter
Winchell and Toots Shor, all of these are small gestures of defiance,
like graffiti on subway cars or dog droppings in the street, embarrass–
ing and real and what one must put up with to bring the self through
the days. As much as anything else, such manhood-posing explains the
usual charge levelled against Hemingway. And well-levelled, let us
admit. The man
is
adolescent. And the writer is, too. And he shows us,
as few other writers do, how important it is that we recognize the truths
the adolescent confronts as he tests his needs and ambitions.
If
Hemingway knew nothing else, he knew that the soul, too, sprouts its
acne, and that such acne can never be eliminated, merel y disguised and
covered over. Understanding this will not change very much today. In
the current drift toward a unisex culture, a drift which seems inevitable
and perhaps even necessary, to understand Hemingway is probably not
imperative. But in the future, after the unisex culture has established its
primacy, we may again be able to put him to use. For one of the
problems that both society and culture are again going to have to face
is the question of exactly what we mean by manhood. To believe that
the idea of manhood is simply going to disappear into an androgynous
ether is naive. How do we go beyond narcissism and yet understand the
male adolescent's need to come to terms with the challenges he poses
for himself? The problem, we may discover, is remarkably old–
fashioned, diametrically opposed to what we are moving towards
today-the unicellular, the androgynous body unsexed by the very
sexuality demanded of it and demeaned by the very democracy of
possibilities that originally seemed to promise so much. Against this,
the harsh stoicism of male adolescent pretense. It is well to remember
that we once read Hemingway not for what he knew but for what he
could demonstrate. He could seize hold of one's own coming-of-age
and he could illuminate the harsh beginnings and false starts of
becoming a man in America.
II
Hemingway's own life was simple enough, at least when we read
about it. The man's complexity emerges from what he felt he had to
make of that life. What saves him from being one more Midwestern
bourgeois trying to find himself by running away from his own inner
