220
PARTISAN REVIEW
To Harold Loeb, the model for Robert Cohn in
The Sun Also Rises:
I was terribly tight and nasty to you last night and I dont want
you to go away with that nasty insulting lousiness as the last thing
of the fiestas . I wish I could wipe out all the mean-ness and I
suppose I cant but this is to let you know that I'm thoroly
ashamed of the way I acted and the stinking, unjust uncalled for
things I said.
Sure we know what some of those things were. To Pauline Pfeiffer,
for whom he was about to leave his first wife, Hadley, he wrote a
letter that took leave of grammar altogether:
All I can think is that you that are all I have and that I love more
than all that is and have given up everything for and betrayed
everything for and killed off everything for are being destroyed
and your nerves and your spirit broken all the time day and night
and that I can't do anything about it because you won't let me.
So I know this is a lousy terribly cheap self pitying letter just
wallowing in bathos etc. etc. etc. and etc. and so it is. 0 Christ I
feel terribly.
And to Scott Fitzgerald:
If
this is a dull shitty letter it is only because I felt so bad that you
were feeling low - am so damned fond of you and whenever you
try to tell anybody anything about working or "life" it is always
bloody platitudes-
The dull shitty letters follow one after the other, without an
idea, a fresh image, or an insight that is not a platitude. One looks in
vain for the celebrated author of
The Sun Also Rises,
of "Big Two–
Hearted River," of the Nick Adams who, propped against the church
wall, a bullet in his spine, speaks to a dying Italian, "Senta Rinaldi .
Senta. You and me we've made a separate peace." One finds instead
just this tiresome young man practicing every day to become a
legend and a bore, and signing himself Papa at the age of twenty–
eight.
What are we to make of this? Malcolm Cowley once proposed
the mystical Jungian idea of the "shadow side" of the personality to
explain Hemingway's inconsistencies, and mystical explanations are
as good as any when the subject is something as obscure as a man's
relation to his art. What is apparent is that Hemingway was able at
first to divide up his life in such a way as to exclude all that was soft
in his character from his writing, and permit only a wiser, more
