MARK SHECHNER
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disciplined version of himself, Jake Barnes or Nick Adams, access to
print. The writing, it is curious to observe, matured separately from
the man . And just as the callow, self-inflating side of Hemingway
was prevented at first from spilling over into his work, so the
sensibility that had taken the measure of modern warfare and the
cruelties of life "in our time" with such keen assurance was not to be
found in Hemingway's social relations. The young Hemingway in
his letters consistently played the
faux naif,
and it is painful to
observe this young man, the toast of the literary world and the
inventor, while yet in his twenties, of an entire modern idiom for
American writing, acting the fool for wives , lovers, fellow writers,
and old fishing cronies .
The answer may be nothing more complicated than a case of
Hemingway drunk and Hemingway sober, a distinction that would
be most sharply drawn in the 1920s, before the onset of the long
stupor of the banquet and safari years. Hemingway consumed
prodigious amounts of alcohol, first as a discipline of manhood, later
as a way of life . Yet nowhere in the many memoirs of Hemingway is
he spoken of as an alcoholic. Maybe that is because he always left the
bar under his own power or had the constitution and temperament
to cover the effects of his drinking with exploits, rather than tears
and recriminations in the manner of Scott Fitzgerald and Harold
Stearns. (Passersby in Paris, seeing Stearns sprawled in some
doorway, were said to remark , "There lies civilization in the United
States.") I find it hard to imagine that Hemingway drank less than
they; he was simply built to drink as they were not, and suffered the
illusion that he was the better man for it. Here, at least, bravado and
self-command served him badly. The manly art of holding your
liquor is no favor to the shell-shocked tissues of the brain that care
nothing for courage , only for oxygen.
I can think of no other American writer whose presence
as a
writer
was so overwhelmingly physical. Normal Mailer has tried with
moderate success to emulate Hemingway's compulsive masculinity,
but he never produced a prose that was of itself symbolic of
muscularity and power. Hemingway treated writing as an athletic
event as, to a degree, it is for all writers. There are distinct writers'
equivalents to being in shape , to warming up, to being up on your
toes or back on your heels, at the peak of your game or over the hill .
There were qualities in Hemingway's early writing suggestive of
agility, footspeed, and economy of effort that were clearly symbolic
of a young man's confidence in his reflexes and strength . Later, the
