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By Root 1048 0

Hemingway was adolescent all his life; intellectually, he was a Philistine on principle. His one talent was aesthetic—a feeling for style, in his writing and in his life, that was remarkably sure. But the limits of aestheticism unsupported by thought or feeling are severe. Hemingway made one big, original stylistic discovery—with the aid of Gertrude Stein—but when he had gotten everything there was to be gotten out of it (and a bit more) he was unable, as Connolly notes, to invent anything else. He was trapped in his style as a miner might be trapped underground; the oxygen is slowly used up without any new air coming in.

Hemingway’s opposites are Stendhal and Tolstoy—interesting he should feel especially awed by them—who had no style at all, no effects. Stendhal wrote the way a police sergeant would write if police sergeants had imagination—a dry, matter-of-fact style. Tolstoy’s writing is clear and colorless, interposing no barrier between the reader and the narrative, the kind of direct prose, businesslike and yet Olympian, that one imagines the Recording Angel uses for entries in his police blotter. There is no need for change or innovation with such styles. But the more striking and original a style is, the greater such necessity. Protean innovators like Joyce and Picasso invent, exploit, and abandon dozens of styles; Hemingway had only one. It was not enough. But he did write some beautiful short stories while it was working. Perhaps they are enough.

Appendix:

DISSENTING OPINION

AUTHOR'S NOTE: George Plimpton, whose interview with Hemingway in Paris Review will be remembered, wrote me the following letter after my article appeared. Because he knew Hemingway (and I didn’t) and because he provides some information which is a useful counterweight to my parody biography (which is a parody and therefore exaggerated) I think it only fair to print his views. In the April, 1962, Encounter, Harvey Breit, who also knew Hemingway, makes much the same points. The two rebuttals that seem to me important are that (a) Hemingway in his last years was working hard at his writing, and (b) that his public and private personalities were not “all of a piece” as I claim. On (a): I was wrong factually, since I was judging only by the little that he published; but the real question is whether what he wrote in that last decade was as good as his pre-1930 stuff; if so, then my whole view of his later years is askew; but we must wait until these writings are published before we can judge; I find it hard to believe that a writer like Hemingway would withhold from print his best things; but we shall see. On (b): the resolution must also wait until his journals, letters, etc., are published; such quotations as I have seen, especially in the Ross profile, seem to me congruent with my portrait, but perhaps there will be revealed, in posthumous documents, a quite different Hemingway; again, we shall see. I hope I am wrong on both (a) and (b).

I have been told that, since I didn’t know Hemingway, I shouldn’t have talked about his personality; such critics, however, never object to my talking about Byron, whom I didn’t know either.

Well dammit, Dwight, let’s start off with his smile. I don’t think Hemingway smiled a smile that was “uneasy around the edges.” It was a big smile, his shoulders shook when he laughed, and he showed his teeth. If he sometimes had a startled look on his face in the photos, that was because of the flashbulbs, which hurt his eyes and gave him fierce headaches.

He didn’t dislike critics as much as you suppose. So much is made of his anti-intellectualism. Doubtless some critics annoyed him. I don’t think your essay would have pleased him. But, after all, he carried on a long correspondence with Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson, Harvey Breit, Carlos Baker, Archibald MacLeish, and any number of others, and while he was very sensitive to criticism, I doubt he thought collectively of critics as “having his number.”[3]

Another canard—that he cultivated celebrities. Besides, it’s stretching a point, isn’t it, to speak of Anderson,