LEONARD KRIEGEL
427
life, it would not do for my purposes.
It
is not, in the long run, the
events of the life that matter; it is what the life continues to mean to me
and to others of my generation, as well as what it may come once again
to mean in the future . For Hemingway remains an American para–
digm. In the final analysis, it was not his prose nor his narrative skills,
formidable as these were, that writers who came after him had to come
to terms with. And it was certainly not his mind or his emotional
insights or his complexity.
It
was that he set himself up as an authority
on virtues which are all too pressing in the life of any American male.
Almost inevitably, one's reactions to Hemingway evolved into one's
reactions to the themes his life and work attempted to unify: the ability
to
use pain, manhood as a response to the challenges one sensed in the
very air, the necessity of courage and the even greater necessity not to
speak about it. To remember such things, and to remember one's own
experience of them, is burdensome, embarrassing. But it is also real.
The man himself was often nasty, small-minded, parochial, even dull–
witted. The small-town anti-Semitism, the awful bragging, the syco–
phantic friendships, the cruelty to his sons and to friends who had once
helped him-all of this makes the actual man a most unattractive
figure . And yet, no matter how corrupt, limited, even ridiculous he
may seem today, I find myself grateful for the example he set, or at least
the example I and my friends thought he set. And in this I suspect that
my own experience is fairly representative.
At eighteen, I read Joyce for language and Faulkner for style and
Eliot for that middle-aged desperation I had already learned to call
"our situation." But I read Hemingway-and it is this which is most
embarrassing today-to learn how to live and to see whether, having
been broken in body by an encounter with polio at the age of eleven, I
could still be as good a man as I thought I had a chance to be. My
involvement with Hemingway, however adolescent, was also distinctly
personal. He was, as I wrote years later, my " nurse." That he was to be
the victim of the virtues the culture endowed him with is beside the
point. My friend was right. Not even Hemingway could be Heming–
way. But he could pretend. And we ... we, at least, could try.
v
In the final analysis, however, the life fails to serve even those who
recognize the integrity of the adolescent vision. Hemingway is a loser.
After courage has been served at the table, much like the wine chilled in
