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By Root 1053 0

she liked and respected him (and what he said and did). She also states that she showed advance proofs to Hemingway and that he made no objections to the article and in fact was pleased with it. One can only admire his objectivity and good nature. But perhaps his reaction was a little too objective. Perhaps it shows an alienation from himself that is neurotic—one should feel a certain amount of prejudice in favor of one’s self, after all. Or perhaps, worse, it means that Hemingway by then had accepted the public personality that had been built up for him by the press—a well-trained lion, he jumped through all the hoops—and even gloried in the grotesque (but virile) Philistine Miss Ross had innocently depicted. This latter possibility is suggested by a letter from Hemingway which Miss Ross quoted in The New Republic, August 7, 1961, when she protested against Irving Howe’s assumption that she had been out to “smear” Hemingway in her New Yorker piece. “The hell with them,” Hemingway wrote her after the piece had been published, apropos of people who had found it “devastating” (as I must confess I still do). “Think one of the ‘devastating’ things was that I drink a little in it and that makes them think I am a rummy. But of course if they (the devastate people) drank what we drink in that piece they would die or something. Then (I should not say it) there is a lot of jealousy around and because I have fun a lot of the time and am not really spooky and so far always get up when they count over me some people are jealous. They can’t understand you being a serious writer and not solemn.” This seems to me, taken in conjunction with Miss Ross’s reportage, to indicate the opposite of what the writer intended to indicate.

Hemingway’s importance, I think, is almost entirely as a stylistic innovator. I have just reread A Farewell to Arms and Men Without Women and what strikes me most is their extreme mannerism. I don’t know which is the more surprising, after twenty years, the virtuosity of the style or its lack of emotional resonance today. Consider the opening paragraphs of In Another Country:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

We were all at the hospital every afternoon, and there were different ways of walking across the town through the dusk to the hospital. Two of the ways were alongside canals, but they were long. Always, though, you crossed a bridge across a canal to enter the hospital. There was a choice of three bridges. On one of them a woman sold roasted chestnuts. It was warm, standing in front of the charcoal fire, and the chestnuts were warm afterwards in your pocket. The hospital was very old and very beautiful, and you entered through a gate on the other side. There were usually funerals starting from the courtyard. Beyond the old hospital were the new brick pavilions, and there we met every afternoon and were all very polite and interested in what was the matter, and sat in the machines that were to make so much difference.

This is a most peculiar way to begin a story. Nothing “happens” until the last sentence of the second paragraph. Up to then everything is simply atmosphere but not atmosphere as it was generally known before Hemingway, except for the wonderful two sentences about the game hanging outside the shops. It is an original mixture of the abstract and the concrete, as in the first sentence, and the effect is to describe not a particular state of mind but rather a particular way of looking at experience, one which makes as sharp a break with previous literary methods as Jackson Pollock made with previous ways of painting.