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PARTISAN REVIEW
contemporaries took the literary life for a sanctuary of the socially
privileged that their art in certain tangents sounded like a school of
racial contempt. Eliot's Jew, the landlord , squatted on the window
sill in "Gerontion," while Pound's captains of usura (Canto XLV)
were off slaying the child in the womb , bringing palsey to bed , and
generally playing havoc
"CONTRA NATURAM."
Pound, of course, par–
layed his generation's most bankrupt sentiments to their most
desperate conclusion in his wartime radio broadcasts for Fascist
Italy, though it is not Pound whom Hemingway most resembled in
his social prejudices, but Eliot. Pound's anti-Semitism was
something of a harebrained radicalism crossed by poetic fever. It was
enriched with ideas about banking and credit, Jefferson and
Confucius, and God knows what. It aspired to be a profound social
idea. Hemingway's anti-Semitism, like Eliot's, was just old–
fashioned midwestern Anglo-Saxon snobbery, the snobbery of
proper birth, proper schooling, and proper know-how . The properly
schooled white guy was one who knew how to bait a hook, tie a fly,
slip a punch, load his own ammo, and mix a damn fine martini (,)ust
enough vermouth to cover the bottom of the glass, ounce 3/4 of gin ,
and the spanish cocktail onions very crisp and also 15 degrees below
zero wh,en they go in the glass"). It was not without cause that
Matthew Arnold called the English aristocracy "the barbarians" and
described their totems as a passion for field sports, the care of the
body, and the cultivation of manly exercises, good looks, and fine
complexion. Hemingway's personal culture, it is plain, was bred in
the bone by generations of barbarians who worshipped the twin gods
of Manly Vigor and Savoir Faire.
It took the war and the example of Pound finally to purge
Hemingway of his anti-Semitism, and after 1945 the more malignant
of his bigotries slipped quietly away. He was being absolutely
sincere when he wrote to Robert Frost in 1957 that he detested
Pound's politics, his anti-Semitism, and his racism. He even struck
up, late in life, a warm friendship with Bernard Berenson, whom he
eventually addressed as "my brother, my father, my
HERO."
Make
of that what you will. Hemingway was never to be free of his rage ,
but the war taught him to parcel it out in a more democratic fashion
and to detest men for
th~mselves
alone.
It is generally conceded that Hemingway's career divides
sharply in two: the first part comprising the two early novels,
The
Sun Also Rises
and
A Farewell to Arms,
and two volumes of stories,
In
Our Time
and
Men Without Women;
the second consisting of all
subsequent writing, with exemptions granted to a few later stories
