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PARTISAN REVIEW
prose grew fat and cruel like the man, lunging, stabbing, and
making up in sheer force what it had lost in balance . Hemingway
was not just aggrandizing an inflated ego in applying sports
metaphors to writing (Eliot, we learn, couldn't hit the ball out of the
infield; Faulkner overmatched himself in going up against
Dostoyevsky the first time out); he spoke from firsthand knowledge
that writing well was no less a discipline of the body than boxing or
bullfighting . His error lay in not taking those metaphors seriously
enough and failing to keep himself in top condition. He dissipated,
and every book after
Death in the Afternoon
was suffused with the
pathos of the hopeless comeback attempt. The tragic side of this
most successful of all American literary careers was Hemingway's
failure to develop as o. writer, his beginning at the top of his game
and going downhill with each succeeding effort. If alcohol was the
key to this decline, then the increasing sogginess of the writing was
wholly of a piece with the afHictions of the man: the debilitating
headaches; the susceptibility to spills and accidents; the rushes of
fury that came out of nowhere to possess him like dybbuks; the
paranoid delusions and suicidal depressions that took hold of him
toward the end and finally claimed him . All were the afHictions of a
drinker.
Hemingway was a creature of contradictions from the very
outset, and just about everyone who has dealt with him has been
absorbed by the paradox of a man so vulgar, so boisterous, so eager
for applause and so quick to applaud himself, being also a celebrant
of grace and, for a brief portion of his career, the tragic poet of
human vulnerability. "He inveighs with much scorn against the
literary life and against the professional literary man of the cities,"
Edmund Wilson said of him in 1939, "and then manages to give the
impression that he himself is a professional literary man of the
touchiest and most self-conscious kind." These letters reinforce one's
impression that Hemingway found writing a perilous adventure,
and that the abuse he heaped upon other writers, usually in
disparagement of their manhood - or womanhood, as the case
happened to be - complemented his reverence for the literary life in
a delicate system of balances designed to shore up his morale. So
alien is the persona that dominates the letters from the deadpan
heroes of the early fiction, so utterly opposed, that one can't be
blamed for seeing the mask of power and omnicompetence he wore
in public as a talisman against all that was vulnerable in him, and
fearful.
