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PARTISAN REVIEW
the bitter facts: Hemingway's precise, Spartan prose, his athlete's
physique and actor's good looks, his independence, his Paul Bunyan
feats of courage and endurance. These qualities, all admirable in
themselves, made it easy for us in the past to mistake him for some–
thing familiar and reassuring: an engaging roughneck, a devil-may–
care adventurer, an American sportsman. Students of literature,
who have been trained to take fine writing as sufficient proof of
grace, have been most susceptible to Papalotry, the admiration
beyond reason of Papa Hemingway. They - we - bridle at the sug–
gestion that someone who writes like an angel may be beyond for–
giveness as a man, which is why the Modern Language Association,
with its doctrine of salvation through good words, sometimes strikes
us as a Protestant sect. That art redeems the artist is an axiom of our
literary culture, turning biographers into disciples and giving us
such kid-glove treatments of our writers as Carlos Baker's
Ernest
Hemingway: A Life Story
and, now, his introduction to these letters:
It is probable that his shortcomings, which were real, undeniable,
and in fact not denied even by himself, were balanced by qualities
that more than tipped the scales in his favor. Among his virtues
must be named his lifelong perseverance and determination in
the use and development of his gifts, his integrity as an artist, his
unremitting reverence for the craft he practiced, and his persis–
tent love of excellence, whether in his own work or that of others .
Observe closely the proposition: that Hemingway the man had his
"shortcomings," but that a "reverence for the craft he practiced"
absolved him of them, "tipped the scales" in his favor. Indeed, if you
lose sight of the critic's thumb as the scales tip over toward
"innocent," you've missed the first trick of Papalotry - of all literary
sanctification for that matter - the confusion of realms that allows
skill and perseverance in writing to be evidence of personal moral
standing.
The letters, however, are strong medicine for all but the most
practiced Papaloter, and the balances and mitigations customarily
called forth in Hemingway's behalf will not sweeten them. They
portray him as a tiresome braggart, a malicious adversary who
heaped scorn on nearly everyone he knew, a racist and anti-Semite,
and a shallow and boring correspondent who wrote many of his
letters-maybe most of them-when too drunk to write fiction. But
first and last they show him as a killer who would catch or drop
