Word: hemingways
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There is a strange inversion which occurs whenthose who would see Hemingway's writing as mereform assume a total merging of form and meaning inthe bravado and masculine ritual thatcharacterized Hemingway's writing and his cult ofpersonality: it is imagined that what appearsadolescent and foolish is merely adolescent andfoolish, driven by the same insecurities thatdrive adolescents. Thus there is only scorn forthe behavior described by Malcolm Cowley in 1925,just a year after the publication of Hemingway'sfirst full-length collection of short stories...
...back room was full of young writers andtheir wives just home from Paris. They were alltelling stories about Hemingway, who first book hadjust appeared, and they were talking in what Iafterward came to recognize as the Hemingwaydialect-tough, matter-of-fact and confidential, Inthe middle of the evening one of them rose, tookoff his jacket and used it to show how he woulddominate a bull...
...question of what this behavior meant, andmeans, is exactly as simple as Hemingway's prose:what is implied runs deeper than most otherwriters could ever state, Cowley explains thatHemingway's "heroes live in a world that is like ahostile forest, full of unseen dangers, not tomention the nightmares that haunt their sleep.Death spies on them from behind every tree. Theironly chance of safety lies in the faithfulobservance of customs they invent for themselves...
Perhaps the tragedy of Hemingway's legacy isthat it appeals with visceral force only those ofhis generation, the young men who would dance withbulls in cafes, imitating the master. The crucialfact is that the famous epigraph to The Sun AlsoRises--Stein's "You are all a Lost Generation"--isneither pretentious nor empty: for Hemingway andfor many of his contemporaries, the assertionthrough life and through writing of theunflinching code of sportsmen’s honor was not asilly return to childhood but a search for a codeof behavior that meant something in a post-Warworld where the land of childhood...
...elimination of moral codes, however, didnot prevent Hemingway from the impossible attemptto assert value, through language and throughaction. As Frederick Henry discovers in A Farewellto Arms, it is precisely because "You could not goback" that you were forced to rebuild. In AFarewell to Arms. Henry discovers that "If you didnot go forward what happened?" The authentictragedy in Hemingway is the hopelessness of thehuman situation: "The world breaks everyone. Butthose that will not break it kills. It kills thevery good and the very gentle and the very braveimpartially." But it is Hemingway's discovery,momentous in his time and in ours...