MARKSHECHNER
223
From our arguments with others , said Yeats , we make rhetoric;
from our arguments with ourselves, poetry; and the poetry of
repression that sustains Hemingway's early writing glowed with a
fine and cool light so long as the basic issues were unresolved , and
neither the tender nor the armor-plated ideas of himself held total
sway. The splendid conception ofJake Barnes is a filament of energy
hung in perfect equipoise between despair and courage. Though
utterly without hope , Jake refuses to go to pieces, and nothing in his
brand of self-composure strikes us as false. The wound and the bow .
Later on, when Hemingway would deny the wound-excepting the
shrapnel wounds he displayed like stigmata-and those apprehen–
sions that had occasioned the stoicism and reserve to begin with, his
exquisite syntheses went to pieces , and with them whatever was lean
and precise in his writing. Yet , true to the law of the return of the
repressed, all the childish impulses he had strongarmed into
submission - the hungers, the dependencies, the nightmares and
dreams of omnipotence - came back to him as delusions he mistook
for realities. Hemingway's world, Isaac Rosenfeld once said
shrewdly, is that which answers to a man's capacity for dealing a
blow. The man who called himself Papa at twenty-eight and wanted
to become the world's daddy was too preoccupied with draining
glasses and delivering knockout punches to notice how childish his
idea of manhood was. The more grown up he strove to appear, the
more infantile he actually became. No wonder Papa remains a
source of such amazement to us : in our time he was the greatest
baby of American letters.
