MARK SHECHNER
219
("The Snows of Kilimanjaro") and, with some reluctance, to
The Old
Man and the Sea.
In other words, by the 1930s and Hemingway's own
thirties - he was born in 1899 - the freshness and vitality that had
made him the bright star among the American expatriates in Paris
had begun to deliquesce into the vanity and bluster of the later
books, starting with
Death in the Afternoon
("bull in the afternoon," said
Max Eastman) and rising to intolerable crescendos in
Across the River
and Into the Trees
and the posthumously published
Islands in the Stream.
The usual interpretation credits this deterioration to
Hemingway's own befuddlement, his yielding up his gifts to his own
heroic mythos of potency, courage, and action, until he lost entirely
the ability to tell the difference between the sporting life and the life
of the mind. There is truth in that : the later books are patently the
work of a damaged and perplexed man who had lost beyond
retrieval the self-possession of youth. But the letters also show us
something quite unexpected : that the swaggering, vainglorious
sportsman photographed with his marlin in Key West, his lion in the
Serengeti , his elk in Wyoming- invariably beaming at the camera
as if to say, "Here, I've just brought down the unconscious
itself' - was there from the start, and that the early achievements of
poise and grace in writing and the social ethic of
non serviam
were
won against great personal odds. At the very height of his success in
the mid-1920s, Hemingway could be as tedious, gauche, and
maudlin as a college boy on a summer tour of the cafes and Bier–
stuben of Europe. "I guess this is a lousy snooty letter," he wrote to
Sherwood Anderson, apologizing for his parody of Anderson in
The
Torrents
of
Spring,
"and it will seem like a lousy snooty book. That
wasn't the way I wanted this letter to be - nor the book ."
It looks, of course, as though I were lining up on the side of the
smart jews like Ben Hecht and those other morning glories and
that because you had always been sweli to me and helped like the
devil on the In our time I felt an irresistable need to push you in
the face with true writer's gratitude. But what I would like you to
know, and of course that sounds like bragging, is-oh hell, I can't
say that either.
To Bill Smith :
Sure I know how you felt when you indited that screed and I had
made a more than offensive bludy ass of myself with Y.K. but
Doodles had my goat and a goatless male ain't renowned for
sound and noble actions. To hell with all that.
