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and the love story tedious except at moments of ordeal or catastrophe. The wounding of the narrator, Lieutenant Henry, and his escape after Caporetto are exciting, and the chapters on the retreat from Caporetto are as good as I remembered, especially the four pages about the shooting of the officers by the battle police. As long as the lieutenant and Catherine Barkley are making love and having “a good time” together, one is bored and skeptical. To my surprise, I found that Catherine was like the heroines of For Whom the Bell Tolls and Across the River and Into the Trees, not a person but an adolescent daydream—utterly beautiful and utterly submissive and utterly in love with the dreamer: “You see I’m happy, darling, and we have a lovely time....You are happy, aren’t you? Is there anything I do you don’t like? Can I do anything to please you? Would you like me to take down my hair? Do you want to play?” “Yes and come to bed.” “All right. I’ll go and see the patients first.” The conversation of these lovers is even more protracted and boring than that of real lovers. (It is curious how verbose Hemingway’s laconic style can become.) But at the end when Catherine dies in childbed, the feeling comes right and one is moved—just as the preceding ordeal of the escape to Switzerland by rowing all night is well done. This deathbed scene is one of the few successful ones in literary history; it is the stylistic antithesis to Dickens’ Death of Little Nell (of which Oscar Wilde remarked, “One must have a heart of stone to read it without laughing”).

The fact is Hemingway is a short-story writer and not a novelist. He has little understanding of the subject matter of the novel: character, social setting, politics, money matters, human relations, all the prose of life. Only the climactic moments interest him, and of those only ordeal, suffering, and death. (Except for a lyrical feeling about hunting and fishing.) In a novel he gets lost, wandering around aimlessly in a circle as lost people are said to do, and the alive parts are really short stories, such as the lynching of the fascists and the blowing up of the bridge in For Whom the Bell Tolls. In the short story he knows just where he is going and his style, which becomes tedious in a novel, achieves the intensity appropriate to the shorter form. The difference may be seen in comparing the dialogue in A Farewell to Arms with that in the little short story, “Hills Like White Elephants,” which is directed with superb craftsmanship to the single bitter point the story makes. Every line of this apparently random conversation between a man and a girl waiting at a Spanish railway station—she is going to Madrid for an abortion he wants but she doesn’t—develops the theme and when toward the end she asks, “Would you do something for me now?” and he replies, “I’d do anything for you,” and she says, “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”—then one feels that tightening of the scalp that tells one an artist has made his point.

“Hemingway’s tragedy as an artist,” Cyril Connolly writes in Enemies of Promise, “is that he has not had the versatility to run away fast enough from his imitators....A Picasso would have done something different; Hemingway could only indulge in invective against his critics—and do it again.” The list of Hemingwayesque writers includes James M. Cain, Erskine Caldwell, John O’Hara, and a school of detective fiction headed by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. It also includes Hemingway. Connolly wrote before Hemingway had begun to parody himself in The Old Man and the Sea—which is simply his early story, “The Undefeated,” perhaps the best thing he ever did, retold in terms of fishing instead of bullfighting and transposed from a spare style into a slack, fake-biblical style which retains the mannerisms and omits the virtues—and in Across the River and Into the Trees, an unconscious self-parody of almost unbelievable fatuity. The peculiar difficulty American creative writers have in maturing has often been commented on. Emotionally,