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urges is his refusal to permit experience to pass him by. But even
within that refusal, he exhibits a fundamental caution, approaching us
like a man who inches his way forward. His response to experience was
always measured, no matter how rebellious he seemed.
Potte maud
it
or
not, his life is stained with a solid American sense of propriety, as if, in
becoming the Hemingway of legend, the man deliberately set out to
make the life an American success story by simply inverting the
morality of the solid bourgeoisie from whom he descended, to be the
doctor's son able to find in the "differences" of his experience that
which would make him the equal of his father and yet provide him
with a greater destiny. There is nothing particularly original in this,
nothing that really captures the contemporary reader's imagination.
Hemingway's conservativism was inevitable, given the tone of his
Midwestern past. And his conservatism is more than stylistic; he was a
writer for whom limitation and measurement ultimately coincided.
What he did best was what he controlled most carefully. When
Faulkner criticized him for not taking chances with his prose, he had
this in mind. And what was true of his prose style was equally true of
the way he lived and of the way he tried to construct that life. He was
not a true rebel. Perhaps he was not even rebellious. And the limita–
tions of his prose are apparent in his life.
Now limitation in a great writer is similar to virtue in others-an
interesting fact, but not particularly memorable unless some terrible
price is paid for its possession. One could, of course, argue that
Hemingway paid that price in his suicide. But even that speaks of
limitation, an indication that in the long run he failed to separate his
own life from that of his father. There is nothing particularly symbolic
about Hemingway's suicide. One simply looks at it today as inevitable,
part of Hemingway's measured response to life. In his recent book on
Henry Miller, the modern American writer most fundamentally oppo–
site to Hemingway, Norman Mailer captures the inevitability of that
suicide: "The eye of every dream Hemingway had must have looked
down the long vista of his future suicide-so he had a legitimate fear of
chaos." Granted. And the legitimacy was to emerge as the only choice
available, the only way in which the life could seize meaning from the
times. He took that lead, too, from his father, obeying him and
challenging him at one and the same time, as he had earlier obeyed and
challenged him in hunting and fishing or, more subtly, in living with
a solid bourgeois sense of obligation and duty. The Protestant haunts
his children, even after the children declare themselves Catholic. One
does not get away so easily in America.
For Hemingway, the suicide must have possessed a strangely
