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By Root 1076 0

was alone. Nothing helped then. He knew he had been very good once, he knew he had been as good as they come at the special kind of thing he was good at, and he knew he had not been good for a long time. He talked big to interviewers: “I trained hard and I beat Mr. De Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, but nobody is going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or keep getting better.” But he knew he was getting worse, and not better. He was a writer and his writing had gone soft a long time ago and he knew this no matter what the Nobel Prize judges and the editors of Life told him and he was a writer and nothing else interested him much. He took shock treatments for depression at the Mayo Clinic. He went twice and he stayed there a long time but they didn’t work. He was overweight and his blood pressure was high and his doctor made him cut down on the eating and drinking. That spring his friend Gary Cooper died. He took it hard. The position is outflanked the lion can’t be stopped the sword won’t go into the bull’s neck the great fish is breaking the line and it is the fifteenth round and the champion looks bad.

Now it is that morning in the house in Ketchum, Idaho. He takes his favorite gun down from the rack. It is a 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun and the stock is inlaid with silver. It is a very beautiful gun. He puts the end of the gun barrel into his mouth and he pulls both triggers.

That week his great shaggy head looks down from the covers of the picture magazines on the news stands and the graduate students smile thinly as they realize that a definitive study of the complete œuvre of Ernest Hemingway is now possible.

A professor of English in North Carolina State College recently called Hemingway “essentially a philosophical writer.” This seems to me a foolish statement even for a professor of literature. It is true that Hemingway originated a romantic attitude which was as seductive to a whole generation, and as widely imitated, as Byron’s had been. (It is still attractive: Norman Mailer, for instance, is a belated Hemingway type, though his prose style is different.) But Hemingway was no more a philosopher than Byron was; in fact, he was considerably less of one. A feeling that loyalty and bravery are the cardinal virtues and that physical action is the basis of the good life—even when reinforced with the kind of nihilism most of us get over by the age of twenty—these don’t add up to a philosophy. There is little evidence of thought in Hemingway’s writing and much evidence of the reverse—the kind of indulgence in emotion and prejudice which the Nazis used to call “blood-thinking.” For all the sureness of his instinct as a writer, he strikes one as not particularly intelligent. Byron wrote Manfred but he also wrote Don Juan and the letters and journals; underneath the romantic pose there was a tough, vigorous, and skeptical mind, a throwback to the eighteenth century and the Age of Reason. There were two Byrons but there was (alas) only one Hemingway. He was hopelessly sincere. His life, his writing, his public personality and his private thoughts were all of a piece. Unlike Byron, he believed his own propaganda. I hate to think what his letters and journals must be like. I suspect he kept no journals, since to do so implies reflection and self-awareness; also that one has a private life as apart from one’s professional and public existence; I don’t think Hemingway did—indeed I think it was this lack of private interests which caused him to kill himself when his professional career had lost its meaning.

We know what his conversation was like, in his later years at least, from Lillian Ross’s minute account of two days spent with Hemingway and his entourage (New Yorker, May 13, 1950). The article presents a Hemingway who sounds as fatuous and as self-consciously he-man as his general in Across the River. At least that is how it sounds to me. But Miss Ross has a different ear. She insists, and I believe her, that (a) she simply reported what Hemingway said and did, and (b) that