626
PARTISAN REVIEW
Certainly, Hemingway was out to get Robert Cohn and Robert Cohn
was Jewish, but Hemingway for the most part used Bill Gorton who
was supposed to be based on Bill Smith or Donald Ogden Stewart or
both of them to express anti-Semitism. Both Bill Smith and Donald
Ogden Stewart were to marry Jewish wives and live happily with
them ever after. I learned to like them both and I never knew gentiles
less touched with anti-Semitism.. .Barnes, the hero of
The Sun ALso
Rises,
who presumably was based on Hemingway, also is supposed by
many commentators to hate Jews. However, I saw a great deal of Hem
for over a year without ever having observed a touch of this prevalent
prej ucliceo
Donald Ogden Stewart explains the matter a bit differently. He sees
Hemingway's treatment of Loeb in
The
Sun A/so
Rises
as part of a larger pat–
tern of attack and repudiation by Hemingway of his friends and
benefactors.
He and I were great friends from '23 until '26, and then the thing hap–
pened that I think eventually happened to most of Ernest's friends:
the minute he began to love you, or the minute he began to have some
sort of an obligation to you of love or friendshi p or something, then
is when he had to kill you. Then you were too close to something that
he was protecting. He, one-by-one, knocked off the best friendships
he ever had. He clid it with Scott; he clid it with Dos Passos-with
everyl?ody. I think that it was a psychological fear he had that you
might ask something from him. He clidn't want to be overdrawn at
your bank.
Stewart's final metaphor of banks and overdrafts gives his statement an
authority he himself might not have claimed. There is the remarkable let–
ter Hemingway's mother wrote to him in 1920, reminding him that a
mother's love for her child is like "a bank." "Each child that is born to her,
enters the world with a large and prosperous bank account, seemingly
inexhaustible." But that, with constant withdrawals over time-and this is
especially so in Ernest's case-"the bank account is perilously low, for
there is nothing coming in, no deposits... unless, in other words, you come
into your manhood-there is nothing before you but bankruptcy:
You have
over drawn."
Perhaps Hemingway could not avoid the guilt instilled in him
by the sort of relationship his mother insisted upon, but he could watch
for it in his friends and thus nip it before it reared its ugly head by repu-
