LEONARD KRIEGEL
421
known as "Poor Old Mama," soon reduced to the initials P. O . M. in a
pecu liar, codified affection. Her speech, like the speech of the wife in
A
Moveable Feast,
is ludicrous in its artificia l formality. In a book which
self-consciously announces its intention as being "to see whether the
shape of a country and the pattern of a month 's action can, if truly
presented , compete with a work of the imagination ," P. O. M. becomes
a kind of jock swagger. Hemingway seems to ask us to look at the
woman he caught, or who caught him, more or less as he asks us to
look at the kudu he shot. "You two are very profound fellows ," says
P. O . M. to Papa and Pop when they speak of their love of Africa. She
earns her pas age there! Keep you mouth shut, your emotions in check,
and your ass tight!
Ultimately, Hemingway's attitude toward suicide, and death in
general, is what marks him off as an adolescent. But a great adolescent,
a magnificent adolescent, and a far more interesting writer than his
current reputation would have us recognize. Like the world of the
adolescent, Hemingway's world is consistently uncertain. The posses–
sion of "grace under pressure" lacks permanence; the moment of
triumph carries no guarantees for the future, except that one is going to
have to fight to maintain that grace over and over again. Even to speak
about it is to run the risk of loss, to find that it has disappeared, like a
puff of smoke, and left one raging and impotent in its wake. All of this
is overwhelmingly ado lescent. And so is the fact that when temptation
arrives, betrayal threatens. However painful, judgment is inevitable.
And it is not qualified. One sees the extent to which Hemingway at his
best embodies this idea in that remarkable story about his father 's
suicide, "Fathers and Sons." The meaning of the dead father 's life lies
in the cha ll enge his suicide poses to Nick Adams, Hemingway's most
faithful persona, just as the meaning of Nick 's own life is to be in the
challenge it poses to his own young son who wants to visit his
grandfather's grave. That Nick has not yet visited his father's grave (in
the story Nick is thirty-eight and seven or eight years seem to have
passed since the suicide) reflects a primitive horror of suicide, the kind
of attitude one might expect of an adolescent for whom the life of the
father is sti ll endowed with a certain magic. He is unable to let go of his
father and he is, consequently, unable to forgive his father an act of
cowardice.
III
The extent of Hemingway's commitment to the adolescent view
can be seen in the way in which he treats pain. No other writer so
