424
PARTISAN REVIEW
the moderns and of their
grande epoque."
Hemingway's body can be
said
to
overwhelm-and the first
to
feel its heaviness was Hemingway
himself.
Pain not only brings the body into a heightened awareness of its
own being, it also testifies to the individual's inevitable failure. There
are limits to endurance. Hemingway conceived of courage as the ability
not to ignore but
to
live with pain and its promi e; he instinctively
knew that one did not have to be a masochist
to
conceive of pain as
liberating. And here, too, his groping is adolescent. To be able to
endure physical pain, punishment, without surrendering the self's
ability to come through is fundamental to the wodd of the male
adolescent. Such pride is a fence between the adolescent and the world
outside; the ways in which he measures prowess are not the ways of
conventional bourgeois society. But the pressure upon the adolescent
must be physical. What he cannot take is that which threatens to
expose him
to
forms of corruption which are outside the boundaries he
recognizes.
It was Philip Young who in nineteen-fifty three first suggested
that "The Battler," one of Hemingway's best known and most fre–
quently anthologized stories, is a story about Nick Adams' confronta–
tion with homosexuality, an evil which lies beyond his psychological
province and which frightens him more than anything else he has yet
encountered in his life because he is not equipped to handle it. He does
not know what masculine behavior is in the situation he confronts. In
a 1966 revision of his book, Young pointed out that the theme crops up
once again in
A Moveable Feast,
"violently, obsessively . .. as it is used
here-a kind of ultimate in evil." Having revolted against his middle–
class home and taken
to
the road, Nick is testing himself with what he
meets along the way. He has been thrown off a train by a railroad
brakeman after having been beaten up. He can handle this because it is
something the adolescent is prepared for. Such pain is merely physical,
and Nick prides himself, as Ad Francis also does, on the fact that he
"could take it. " H e has been beaten up, but he has not been humiliated.
His confrontation with the punchdrunk fighter and the shadowy
Negro tramp, Bugs, is far more threatening. And Nick's instincts are
correct. What he senses as Ad turns on him is that he may discover
someone who can not only hurt him physically but can make him
subservient to his will. Ad Francis can humiliate Nick as no railroad
brakeman can. Implicitly, the threat he embodies is sexual; he is going
to rob Nick of his burgeoning adolescent sexuality.
It scarcely matters whether Hemingway's protests that homosexu-
