Research Paper After reading, watching, and studying the Canvas module resources, write at least an 650 word essay supporting the claim, Francis Macomber goes on the hero's journey.Use in text citatio

Hemingway Author(syf 5 R E H U W 3 H Q Q : D U U H n Source: The Kenyon Review, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Winter, 1947yf S S 8 Published by: Kenyon College Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4332813 Accessed: 08-11-2017 21:21 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Kenyon College is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Kenyon Review This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Kenyon Review Vol. IX WINTER, 1947 No. I Robert Penn Warren HEMINGWAY T HE situations and characters of Hemingway's world are usually violent. There is the hard-drinking and sexually pro- miscuous world of The Sun Also Rises; the chaotic and brutal world of war as in A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, many of the inserted sketches of In Our Time, the play The Fifth Column, and some of the stories; the world of sport, as in "Fifty Grand," "My Old Man," "The Undefeated," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"; the world of crime as in "The Killers," "The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio," and To Have and To Have Not. Even when the situation of a story does not fall into one of these categories, it usually involves a desperate risk, and behind it is the shadow of ruin, physical or spiritual. As for the typical characters, they are usually tough men, experienced in the hard worlds they inhabit, and not obviously given to emotional display or sensitive shrinking, men like Rinaldi or Frederick Henry of A Farewell to Arms, Robert Jordan of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Harry Morgan of To Have and To Have Not, the big-game hunter of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," the old bull-fighter of "The Un- defeated," or the pugilist of "Fifty Grand." Or if the typical character is not of this seasoned order, he is a very young man, or boy, first entering the violent world and learning his first adjust- ment to it. We have said that the shadow of ruin is behind the typical Hemingway situation. The typical character faces defeat or This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 2 KENYON REV I EW death. But out of defeat or death the character usually man- ages to salvage something. And here we discover Heming- way's special interest in such situations and such characters. His heroes are not defeated except upon their own terms. They are not squealers, welchers, compromisers, or cowards, and when they confront defeat they realize that the stance they take, the stoic endurance, the stiff upper lip mean a kind of victory. Defeated upon their own terms, some of them have even courted their defeat; and certainly they have maintained, even in the practical defeat, an ideal of themselves, some definition of how a man should behave, formulated or unformulated, by which they have lived. They represent some notion of a code, some notion of honor, which makes a man a man, and which distin- guishes him from people who merely follow their random impulses and who are, by consequence, "messy." In case after case, we can illustrate this "principle of sports- manship," as one critic has called it, at the center of a story or novel. For instance, Brett, the heroine of The Sun Also Rises, gives up Romero, the young bullfighter with whom she is in love, because she knows she will ruin him, and her tight-lipped remark to Jake, the newspaper man who is the narrator of the novel, might almost serve as the motto of Hemingway's work: "You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch." It is the discipline of the code which makes man human, a sense of style or good form. This applies not only in isolated, dramatic cases such as those listed above, but in a more pervasive way which can give meaning, partially at least, to the confusions of living. The discipline of the soldier, the form of the athlete, the gameness of the sportsman, the technique of an artist can give some sense of the human order, and can achieve a moral signifi- cance. And here we see how Hemingway's concern with war and sport crosses his concern with literary style. If a writer can get the kind of style at which Hemingway professed, in Green Hills of Africa, to aim, then "nothing else matters. It is more import- This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ROBERT PENN WARREN 3 ant than anything else he can do." It is more important because, ultimately, it is a moral achievement. And no doubt for this reason, as well as for the reason of Henry James's concern with cruxes of a moral code, he is, as he says in Green Hills of Africa, an admirer of the work of James, the devoted stylist. But to return to the subject of Hemingway's world: the code and the discipline are important because they can give meaning to life which otherwise seems to have no meaning or justification. In other words, in a world without supernatural sanctions, in the God-abandoned world of modernity, man can realize an ideal meaning only in so far as he can define and maintain the code. The effort to define and maintain the code, however limited and imperfect it may be, is the characteristically human effort and pro- vides the tragic or pitiful human story. Hemingway's attitude on this point is much like that of Robert Louis Stevenson as Stevenson states it in one of his essays, "Pulvis et Umbra": -everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some de- cency of thought or carriage, everywhere the ensign of man's in- effectual goodness . . . under every circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honor, the poor jewel of their souls! They may seek to escape, and yet they cannot; it is not alone their privilege and glory, but their doom; they are condemned to some nobility . . . . Hemingway's code is more rigorous than Stevenson's and per- haps he finds fewer devoted to it, but like Stevenson he can find his characteristic hero and characteristic story among the discards of society, and like Stevenson is aware of the touching irony of that fact. But for the moment the important thing in the parallel is that, for Stevenson, the world in which this drama of pitiful aspiration and stoic endurance is played out is, objectively con- sidered, a violent and meaningless world- "our rotary island loaded with predatory life and more drenched with blood than ever mutinied ship . . . scuds through space." Neither Heming- way nor Stevenson invented this world. It had already appeared This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 4 KENYON REVIEW in literature before their time, and that is a way of saying that this cheerless vision had already begun to trouble men. It is the world we find pictured (and deniedyf L Q 7 H Q Q \ V R Q V , Q 0 H P R U L D P - the world in which human conduct is a product of "dying Nature's earth and lime." It is the world pictured (and not deniedyf L n Hardy and Housman, a world which seems to be presided over by blind Doomsters (if by anybodyyf D V + D U G \ S X W L W L Q K L V S R H m "Hap," or made by some brute and blackguard (if by anybodyyf , as Housman put it in his poem "The Chestnut Casts Its Flam- beaux." It is the world of Zola or Dreiser or Conrad or Faulkner. It is the world of, to use Bertrand Russell's phrase, "secular hur- ryings through space." It is the God-abandoned world, the world of Nature-as-all. We know where the literary men got this pic- ture. They got it from the scientists of the 19th Century. This is Hemingway's world, too, the world with nothing at center. Over against this naturalistic view of the world, there was, of course, an argument for Divine Intelligence and a Divine purpose, an argument which based itself on the beautiful system of nature, on natural law. The closely knit order of the natural world, so the argument ran, implies a Divine Intelligence. But if one calls Hemingway's attention to the fact that the natural world is a world of order, his reply is on record in a story called "A Natural History of the Dead." There he quotes from the traveller Mungo Park, who, naked and starving in an African desert, observed a beautiful little moss-flower and meditated thus: Can the Being who planted, watered, and brought to perfection, in this obscure part of the world, a thing which appears of so small importance, look with unconcern upon the situation and suff- ering of creatures formed after his own image? Surely not. Reflec- tions like these would not allow me to despair: I started up and, dis- regarding both hunger and fatigue, travelled forward, assured that relief was at hand; and I was not disappointed. And Hemingway continues: With a disposition to wonder and adore in like manner, as Bishop Stanley says [the author of A Familiar History of Birds], can This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ROBERT PENN WARREN 5 any branch of Natural History be studied without increasing that faith, love and hope which we also, everyone of us, need in our journey through the wilderness of life? Let us therefore see what inspiration we may derive from the dead. Then Hemingway presents the picture of a modern battlefield, where the bloated and decaying bodies give a perfect example of the natural order of chemistry-but scarcely an argument for faith, hope, and love. That picture is his answer to the argument that the order of nature implies meaning in the world. In one of the stories, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," we find the best description of this world which underlies Hemingway's world of violent action. Early in the story we see an old man sitting late in a Spanish cafe. Two waiters are speaking of him. "Last week he tried to commit suicide," one waiter said. "Why ?" "He was in despair." "What about?" "Nothing." "How do you know it was nothing?" "He has plenty of money." The despair beyond plenty of money-or beyond all the other gifts of the world: its nature becomes a little clearer at the end of the story when the older of the two waiters is left alone, re- luctant too to leave the clean, well-lighted place. Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself. It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada.' Our nada who art in nada, nada 1. nada y pues nada, etc.: nothing and after that nothing, etc. This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 6 KENYON REVIEW be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine. "What's yours?" asked the barman. "Nada." At the end the old waiter is ready to go home: Now, without thinking further, he would go home to his room. He would lie in bed and finally, with daylight, he 'would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it's probably only insomnia. Many must have it. And the sleepless man-the man obsessed by death, by the meaninglessness of the world, by nothingness, by nada-is one of the recurring symbols in the works of Hemingway. In this phase Hemingway is a religious writer. The despair beyond plenty of money, the despair which makes a sleeplessness beyond insomnia, is the despair felt by a man who hungers for the certainties and meaningfulness of a religious faith but who cannot find in his world a ground for that faith. Another recurring symbol, we have said, is the violent man. But the sleepless man and the violent man are not contradictory but complementary symbols. They represent phases of the same question, the same hungering for meaning in the world. The sleepless man is the man brooding upon nada, upon chaos, upon Nature-as-all. (For Nature-as-all equals moral chaos; even its bulls and lions and kudu are not admired by Hemingway as creatures of consicous self-discipline; their courage is meaningful only in so far as it symbolizes human courage.yf 7 K H Y L R O H Q W P D n is the man taking an action appropriate to the realization of the fact of nada. He is, in other words, engaged in the effort to dis- cover human values in a naturalistic world. Before we proceed with this line of discussion, it might be This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ROBERT PENN WARREN 7 asked, "Why does Hemingway feel that the quest necessarily in- volves violence?" Now, at one level, the answer to this question would involve the whole matter of the bias toward violence in modern literature. But let us take it in its more immediate reference. The typical Hemingway hero is the man aware, or in the process of becoming aware, of nada. Death is the great nada. Therefore whatever solution the hero gets must, to be good, stick even against the fact of death. It has to be good in the bull- ring or on the battle field and not merely in the study or lecture room. In fact, Hemingway is anti-intellectual, and has a great contempt for any type of solution arrived at without the testings of immediate experience. One of his more uningratiating pass- ages- again from "A Natural History of the Dead"- makes the point amply clear: The only natural death I've ever seen, outside of the loss of blood, which isn't bad, was death from Spanish influenza. In this you drown in mucus, choking, and how you know the patient's dead is: at the end he turns to be a little child again, though with his manly force, and fills the sheets as full as any diaper with one vast, final yellow cataract that flows and dribbles on after he is gone. So now I want to see the death of any self-styled Humanist because a persevering traveller like Mungo Park or me lives on and maybe yet will see the actual death of members of this literary sect and watch the noble exits they make. In my musings as a naturalist it has occurred to me that while decorum is an excellent thing, some must be indecorous if the race is to be carried on since the position de- scribed for procreation is indecorous, highly indecorous, and it oc- curred to me that perhaps that is what these people are, or were: the children of decorous cohabitation. But regardless of how they started I hope to see the finish of a few, and speculate how worms will try that long preserved sterility; with their quaint pamphlets gone to bust and into foot-notes all their lust. So aside from the question of a dramatic sense which would favor violence, and aside from the mere matter of personal tem- perament (for Hemingway describes himself on more than one occasion as obsessed by deathyf W K H S U H V H Q W D W L R Q R I Y L R O H Q F H L s appropriate in his work because death is the great nada. In This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 8 KENYON REVIEW taking violent risks man confronts in dramatic terms the issue of nada which is implicit in all of Hemingway's world. But to return to our general line of discussion. There are two aspects to this violence which is involved in the quest of the Hem-- ingway hero, two aspects which seem to represent an ambivalent attitude toward nature. First, there is the conscious sinking into nature, shall we call it. On this line of reasoning we would find something like this: if there is at center only nada, then the only sute compensation in life, the only reality, is gratification of appetite, the relish of sen- sation. Continually in the stories and novels one finds such sen- tences as this from Green Hills of Africa: " . . . drinking this, the first one of the day, the finest one there is, and looking at the thick bush we passed in the dark, feeling the cool wind of the night and smelling the good smell of Africa, I was altogether happy." What is constantly interesting in such sentences is the fact that happiness, a notion which we traditionally connect with a complicated state of being, with notions of virtue, of achievement, etc., is here equated with a set of merely agreeable sensations. The careful relish of sensation-that is what counts, always. This intense awareness of the world of the senses is, of course, one of the things which made the early work of Hemingway seem, upon its first impact, so fresh and pure. Physical nature is no- where rendered with greater vividness than in his work, and prob- ably his only competitors in this department of literature are William Faulkner, among the modern, and Henry David Thoreau, among the older American writers. The meadows, forests, lakes, and trout streams of America, and the arid, sculpturesque mount- ains of Spain, appear with astonishing immediacy, an immediacy not dependent upon descriptive flourishes. But not only the ap- pearance of landscape is important; a great deal of the freshness comes from the discrimination of sensation, the coldness of water in the "squlchy" shoes after wading, the tangy smell of dry sage brush, the "cleanly" smell of grease and oil on a field piece. This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ROBERT PENN WARREN 9 Hemingway's appreciation and rendering of the aesthetic quality of the physical world is important, but a peculiar poignancy is implicit in the rendering of those qualities; the beauty of the physical world is a background for the human predicament, and the very relishing of the beauty is merely a kind of desperate and momentary compensation possible in the midst of the predicament. This careful relishing of the world of the senses comes to a climax in drinking and sex. Drink is the "giant-killer," the weapon against man's thought of nada. And so is sex, for that matter, though when sexual attraction achieves the status of love, the process is one which attempts to achieve a meaning rather than to forget meaninglessness in the world. In terms of drinking and sex, the typical Hemingway hero is a man of monel-metal stomach and Homeric prowess in the arts of love. And the typical situation is love, with some drinking, against the background of nada-of civilization gone to pot, or war, or death-as we get it in all of the novels in one form or another, and in many of the stories. It is important to remember, however, that the sinking into nature, even at the level of drinking and mere sexuality, is a self- conscious act. It is not the random gratification of appetite. We see this quite clearly in The Sun Also Rises in the contrast be- tween Cohn, who is merely a random dabbler in the world of sensation, who is merely trying to amuse himself, and the initiates like Jake and Brett, who are aware of the nada at the center of things and whose dissipations, therefore, have a philosophical significance. The initiate in Hemingway's world raises the grati- fication of appetite to the level of a cult and a discipline. The cult of sensation, as we have already indicated, passes over very readily into the cult of true love, for the typical love story is presented primarily in terms of the cult of sensation. (A Farewell to Arms, as we shall see when we come to a detailed study of that novel, is closely concerned with that transition.yf Even in the cult of true love it is the moment which counts, and the individual. There is never any past or future to the love This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 10 KENYON REVIEW stories and the lovers are always isolated, not moving in an ordinary human society within its framework of obligations. The notion of the cult-a secret cult composed of those who have been initiated into the secret of nada-is constantly played up. In A Farewell to Arms, for instance, Catherine and Frederick are, quite consciously, two against the world, a world which is, literally as well as figuratively, an alien world. The peculiar relationship between Frederick and the priest takes on a new significance if viewed in terms of the secret cult. We shall come to this topic later, but for the moment we can say that the priest is a priest of Divine Love, the subject about which he and Fred- erick converse in the hospital, and that Frederick himself is a kind of priest, one of the initiate in the end, of the cult of profane love. This same pattern of two against the world, with an understanding confidante or interpreter, reappears in For Whom the Bell Tolls -with Pilar, the gipsy woman who understands "love," substitut- ing for the priest of A Farewell to Arms. The initiates of the cult of love are those who are aware of nada, but their effort, as members of the cult, is to find a meaning to put in place of the nada. That is, there is an attempt to make the relationship of love take on a religious significance in so far as it can give meaning to life. This general topic is not new with the work of Hemingway. It is one of the literary themes of the 19th Century-and has, as a matter of fact, a much longer history than that. But we find it fully stated in the last century in many instances. To take one, there is "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold. In a world from which religious faith has been removed the lovers can only turn to each other to find significance in life: Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ROBERT PENN WARREN 11 Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. If the cult of love arises from and states itself in the language of the cult of sensation, it is an extension of the sinking-into-nature aspect of the typical Hemingway violence; but in so far as it in- volves a discipline and a search for a "faith," it leads us to the sec- ond aspect of the typical violence. The violence, although in its first aspect it represents a sinking into nature, at the same time, in its second aspect, represents a conquest of nature, and of nada in man. It represents such a con- quest, not because of the fact of violence, but because the violence appears in terms of discipline, a style, and a code. It is, as we have already seen, in terms of a self-imposed discipline that the heroes make one gallant, though limited, effort to redeem the incoher- ence of the world: they attempt to impose some form upon the dis- order of their lives, the technique of the bull fighter or sportsman, the discipline of the soldier, the fidelity of the lover, or even the code of the gangster, which, though brutal and apparently dehu- manizing, has its own ethic. The discipline, the form, is never quite capable of subduing the world, but fidelity to it is part of the gallantry of defeat. By fi- delity to it the hero manages to keep one small place "clean" and "well-lighted," and manages to retain, or achieve for one last mo- ment, his dignity. As the old Spanish waiter muses, there should be a "clean, well-lighted place" where one could keep one's dignity at the late hour. We have said earlier that the typical Hemingway character is tough and, apparently, insensitive. But only apparently, for the fidelity to a code, to the discipline, may be the index to a sensitivity which allows the characters to see, at moments, their true plight. At times, and usually at times of stress, it is the tough man in the Hemingway world, the disciplined man, who is actually aware of pathos or tragedy. The individual toughness (which may be taken This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 12 KENYON REVIEW to be the private discipline demanded by the worldyf P D \ I L Q G L W - self in conflict with the natural human reaction; but the Heming- way hero, though he may be aware of the claims of the natural reaction, the spontaneous human emotion, cannot surrender to it because he knows that the only way to hold on to the definition of himself, to "honor" or "dignity," is to maintain the discipline, the code. For example, when pity appears in the Hemingway world as in "The Pursuit Race" - it does not appear in its maximum but in its minimum manifestation. What this means in terms of style and method is the use of understatement. This understatement, stemming from the con- trast between the sensitivity and the superimposed discipline, is a constant aspect of the work, an aspect which was caught in a car- toon in the New Yorker. The cartoon showed a brawny, muscle- knotted forearm and a hairy hand which clutched a rose. It was entitled "The Soul of Ernest Hemingway." Just as there is a mar- gin of victory in the defeat of the Hemingway characters, so there is a little margin of sensitivity in their brutal and apparently in- sensitive world. Hence we have the ironical circumstance - a central circumstance in creating the pervasive irony of Heming- way's work - that the revelation of the values characteristic of his work arises from the most unpromising people and the most un- promising situations - the little streak of poetry or pathos in "The Pursuit Race," "The Killers," "My Old Man," "A Clean, Well- Lighted Place," or "The Undefeated." We have a perfect example of it in the last named story. After the defeat of the old bull fight- er, who is lying wounded on an operating table, Zurito, the pica- dor, is about to cut off his pigtail, the mark of his profession. But when the wounded man starts up, despite his pain, and says, "You couldn't do a thing like that," Zurito says, "I was joking." Zurito becomes aware that, after all, the old bull fighter is, in a way, un- defeated, and deserves to die with his coleta on. This locating of the poetic, the pathetic, or the tragic in the unpromising person or situation is not unique with Hemingway. This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ROBERT PENN WARREN 13 It is something with which we are acquainted in a great deal of our literature since the Romantic Movement. The sensibility is played down, and an anti-romantic surface sheathes the work; the point is in the contrast. The impulse which led Hemingway to the simple character is akin to that which drew Wordsworth to the same choice. Wordsworth felt that his unsophisticated peasants were more honest in their responses than the cultivated man, and were therefore more poetic. Instead of Wordsworth's peasant we have in Hemingway's work the bull fighter, the soldier, the revolutionist, the sportsman, and the gangster; instead of Wordsworth's children we have the young men like Nick, the person just on the verge of being initiated into the world. There are, of course, differences between the approach of Wordsworth and that of Hemingway, but there is little difference on the point of marginal sensibility. In one sense, both are anti-intel- lectual, and in such poems as "Resolution and Independence" or "Michael" one finds even closer ties. I have just indicated a similarity between Wordsworth and Hemingway on the grounds of a romantic anti-intellectualism. But with Hemingway it is far more profound and radical than with Wordsworth. All we have to do to see the difference is to put Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads over against any number of passages from Hemingway. The intellectualism of the 18th Century had merely put a veil of stereotyped language over all the world and a veil of snobbism over a large area of human experience. That is Wordsworth's indictment. But Hemingway's indictment of the intellectualism of the past is that it wound up in the mire and blood of 1914 to 1918; that it was a pack of lies leading to death. We can put over against the Preface of Words- worth, a passage from A Farewell to Arms: I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 14 KENYON REVIEW slapped up by biliposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glori- ous had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity . . . . Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. I do not mean to say that the general revolution in style, and the revolt against the particular intellectualism of the 19th Century was a result of the World War, 1914-18. As a matter of fact, that revolt was going on long before the war, but for Hemingway, and for many others, the war gave the stiuation a peculiar depth and urgency. Perhaps we might scale the matter thus: Wordsworth was a revolutionist-he truly had a new view of the world-but his re- volutionary view left great tracts of the world untouched; the Church of England, for instance. Arnold and Tennyson, a gen- eration or so later, though not revolutionists themselves, are much more profoundly stirred by the revolutionary situation than ever Wordsworth was; that is, the area of the world involved in the debate was for them greater. Institutions are called into question in a more fundamental way. But they managed to hang on to their English God and their English institutions. With Hardy, the area of disturbance has grown greater, and what can be salvaged is much less. He, like the earlier Victorians, had a strong sense of community to sustain him in the face of the universe which was for him, as not finally for Arnold and Tennyson, unfriendly, or at least neutral and Godless. But his community underlay institu- tions, a human communion which as a matter of fact was constantly being violated by institutions; and this violation is, in fact, a con- stant source of subject matter and a constant spring of irony. Nevertheless Hardy could refer to himself as a meliorist. But with Hemingway, though there is a secret community, it This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ROBERT PENN WARREN 15 has greatly shrunk, and its definition has become much more specialized. Its members are those who know the code. They recognize each other, they know the password and the secret grip, but they are few in number, and each is set off against the world like a wounded lion ringed round by waiting hyenas. (Green Hills of Africa gives us the hyena symbol-the animal whose death is comic because it is all hideously "appetite," wounded, it eats its own intestines.yf ) X U W K H U P R U H W K L V V H F U H W F R P P X Q L W \ L V Q R t constructive; Hemingway is no meliorist. In fact, there are hints that somewhere in the back of his mind, and in behind his work, there is a kind of Spenglerian view of history: our civilization is running down. We get this most explicitly in Green Hills of Africa: A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. A country wears out quickly unless man puts back in it all his residue and that of all his beasts. When he quits using beasts and uses machines, the earth defeats him quickly. The machine can't reproduce, nor does it fertilize the soil, and it eats what he cannot raise. A country was made to be as we found it. We are the intruders and after we are dead we may have ruined it but it will still be there and we don't know what the next changes are. I suppose they all end up like Mongolia. I would come back to Africa but not to make a living from it . . . . But I would come back to where it pleased me to live; to really live. Not just let my life pass. Our people went to America because that was the place for them to go then. It had been a good country and we had made a bloody mess of it and I would go, now, somewhere else as we had always had the right to go somewhere else and as we had always gone. You could always come back. Let the others come to America who did not know that they had come too late. Our people had seen it at its best and fought for it when it was well worth fighting for. Now I would go somewhere else. This is the most explicit statement, but the view is implicit in case after case. The general human community, the general hu- This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 16 KENYON REVIEW man project, has gone to pot. There is only the little secret community of, paradoxically enough, individualists who have resigned from the general community, and who are strong enough to live without any illusions, lies, and big words of the herd. At least, this is the case up to the novel To Have and To Have Not, In that novel and in For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway at- tempts to return, as it were, his individualistic hero to society, to give him a common stake with the fate of other men. But to come back to the matter of Wordsworth and Heming- way. What in Wordsworth is merely simple or innocent is in Hemingway violent: the gangster or bull-fighter replaces the leech- gatherer or the child. Hemingway's world is a more disordered world, and the sensibility of his characters is more ironically in contrast with their world. The most immediate consideration here is the playing down of the sensibility as such, the sheathing of it in the code of toughness. Gertrude Stein's tribute is here relevant: "Hemingway is the shyest and proudest and sweetest- smelling story-teller of my reading." But this shyness manifests itself in the irony. In this, of course, Hemingway's irony corres- ponds to the Byronic irony. But the relation to Byron is even more fundamental. The pity is only valid when it is wrung from the man who has been seasoned by experience. Therefore a pre- mium is placed on the fact of violent experience. The "dumb ox" character, commented on by Wyndham Lewis, represents the Wordsworthian peasant; the character with the code of the tough guy, the initiate, the man cultivating honor, gallantry, and reck- lessness, represents the Byronic aristocrat. The failures of Hemingway, like his successes, are also rooted in this situation. The successes occur in those instances where Hem- ingway accepts the essential limitations of his premises, that is, when there is an equilibrium between the dramatization and the characteristic Hemingway "point," when the system of ironies and understatements is coherent. On the other hand, the failures occur when we feel that Hemingway has not respected the limitations of This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ROBERT PENN WARREN 17 his premises; that is, when the dramatization seems to be "rigged" and the violence, therefore, merely theatrical. The characteristic irony, or understatement, in such cases, seems to be too self-con- scious. For example, let us glance at Hemingway's most spec- tacular failure, To Have and To Have Not. The point of the novel is based on the contrast between the smuggler and the rich owners of the yachts along the quay. But the irony is essentially an irony without center or reference. It is superficial, for, as a critic in the Partisan Review indicated, the only difference between the smug- gler and the rich is that the rich were successful in their buccaneer- ing. The revelation which comes to the smuggler dying in his launch-"a man alone ain't got no . . chance"-is a meaningless revelation, for it has no reference to the actual dramatization. It is, finally, a failure in intellectual analysis of the situation. In the same way, the much advertised "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is a failure. Much has been said to the effect that To Have and To Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls represent a basic change of point of view, an enlargement of what I have called the secret community. Now no doubt that is the intention behind both books, but the temper of both books is the old temper, the cast of characters is the old cast, and the assumptions lying far below the explicit intention are the old assumptions. The monotony and self-imitation into which Hemingway's work sometimes falls is again an effect of a failure in dramatiza- tion. Hemingway, apparently, can dramatize his "point" in only one basic situation and with only one set of characters. As we have seen, he has only two key characters, with certain variations from them in terms of contrast or counterpoint. His best women char- acters, by the way, are those which most nearly approximate the men; that is, they embody the masculine virtues and point of view characteristic of Hemingway's work. But the monotony is not merely a monotony deriving from the characters as types; it derives, rather from the limitations of the This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 18 KENYON REVIEW author's sensibility, which can find interest only in one issue. A more flexible sensibility, one capable of making nicer discrimina- tions, might discover great variety in such key characters and situa- tions. But Hemingway's successes are due, in part at least, to the close coordination which he sometimes achieves between the char- acter and situation on the one hand, and the sensibility as it re- flects itself in the style, on the other hand. The style characteristically is simple, even to the point of monotony. The characteristic sentence is simple, or compound; and if compound, there is no implied subtlety in the coordination of the clauses. The paragraph structure is, characteristically, based on simple sequence. There is an obvious relation between this style and the characters and situations with which the author is concerned - a question of dramatic decorum. (There are, on the other hand, examples, especially in the novels, of other more flu- ent, lyrical effects, but even here this fluency is founded on the conjunction and; it is a rhythmical and not a logical fluency. And the lyrical quality is simply a manifestation of that marginal sen- sibility, as can be demonstrated by an analysis of the occasions on which it appears.yf % X W W K H U H L V D P R U H I X Q G D P H Q W D O D V S H F W R I W K e question, an aspect which involves not the sensibility of the char- acters but the sensibility of the author. The short simple rhythms, the succession of coordinate clauses, the general lack of subordina- tion all suggest a dislocated and ununified world. The fig- ures which live in this world live a sort of hand-to-mouth existence perceptually, and conceptually, they hardly live at all. 2. A Farewell to Arms is a love story. It is a compelling story at the merely personal level, but is much more compelling and sig- nificant when we see the figures of the lovers silhouetted against the flame-streaked blackness of war, of a collapsing world, of nada. For there is a story behind the love story. That story is the quest for meaning and certitude in a world which seems to offer This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ROBERT PENN WARREN 19 nothing of the sort. It is, in a sense, a religious book; if it does not offer a religious solution it is nevertheless conditioned by the religious problem. The very first scene of the book, though seemingly casual, is important if we are to understand the deeper motivations of the story. It is the scene at the officers' mess where the captain baits the priest. "Priest every night five against one," the captain ex- plains to Frederick. But Frederick, we see in this and later scenes, takes no part in the baiting. There is a bond between him and the priest, a bond which they both recognize.. This becomes clear when, after the officers have advised Frederick where he should go on his leave to find the best girls, the priest turns to him and says that he would like for him to go to Abruzzi, his own province: "There is good hunting. You would like the people and though it is cold it is clear and dry. You could stay with my family. My father is a famous hunter." "Come on," said the captain. "We go whorehouse before it shuts." "Goodnight," I said to the priest. "Goodnight," he said. In the preliminary contrast between the officers, who invite the hero to go to the brothels, and the priest, who invites him to go to the cold, clear, dry country, we have in its simplest form the issue of the novel. Frederick does go with the officers that night, and on his leave he does go to the cities, "to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring." Frederick at the opening of the novel lives in the world of random and mean- ingless appetite, knowing that it is all and all and all, or thinking that he knows that. But behind that there is a dissatisfaction and This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 20 KENYON REV I EW disgust. Upon his return from his leave, sitting in the officers' mess, he tries to tell the priest how he is sorry that he had not gone to the clear, cold, dry country - the priest's home, which takes on the shadowy symbolic significance of another kind of life, another view of the world. The priest had always known that other coun- try. He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later. What Frederick learns later is the story behind the love story of the book. But this theme is not merely stated at the opening of the novel and then absorbed into the action. It appears later, at crucial points, to define the line of meaning in the action. When, for example, Frederick is wounded, the priest visits him in the hos- pital. Their conversation makes even plainer the religious back- ground of the novel. The priest has said that he would like to go back after the war to the Abruzzi. He continues: "It does not matter. But there in my country it is understood that a man may love God. It is not a dirty joke." "I understand." He looked at me and smiled. "You understand but you do not love God." "No." "You do not love him at all ?" he asked. "I am afraid of him in the night sometimes." "You should love Him." "I don't love much." "Yes," he said. "You do. 'What you tell me about in the nights. That is not love. That is only passion and lust. When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve." "I don't love." "You will. I know you will. Then you will be happy." We have here two items of importance.. First, there is the definition of Frederick as the sleepless man, the man haunted by This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ROBERT PENN WARREN 21 nada. Second, at this stage in the novel, the end of Book I, the true meaning of the love story with Catherine has not yet been de- fined. It is still at the level of appetite. The priest's role is to indicate the next stage of the story, the discovery of the true na- ture of love, the "wish to do things for." And he accomplishes this by indicating a parallel between secular love and Divine love, a parallel which implies Frederick's quest for meaning and certi- tude. And to emphasize further this idea, Frederick, after the priest leaves, muses on the high, clean country of the Abruzzi, the priest's home which has already been endowed with the symbolic significance of the religious view of the world. In the middle of Book II (Chapter xviiiyf L Q Z K L F K W K H O R Y e story begins to take on the significance which the priest had pre- dicted, the point is indicated by a bit of dialogue between the lovers. "Couldn't we be married privately some way? Then if anything happened to me or if you had a child." "There's no way to be married except by church or state. We are married privately. You see, darling, it would mean everything to me if I had any religion. But I haven't any religion." "You gave me the Saint Anthony." "That was for luck. Some one gave it to me." "Then nothing worries you ?" "Only being sent away from you. You're my religion. You're all I've got." Again, toward the end of Book IV (Chapter xxxvyf M X V W E H I R U e Frederick and Catherine make their escape into Switzerland, Fred- erick is talking with a friend, the old Count Greffi, who has just said that he thought H. G. Wells's novel Mr. Britling Sees It Through a very good study of the English middle-class soul. But Frederick twists the word soul into another meaning. "I don't know about the soul." "Poor boy. We none of us know about the soul. Are you Croy- ant ?" "At night." This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 22 KENYON REV I EW Later in the same conversation the Count returns to the topic: "And if you ever become devout pray for me if I am dead. I am asking several of my friends to do that. I had expected to be- come devout myself but it has not come." I thought he smiled sadly but I could not tell. He was so old and his face was very wrinkled, so that a smile used so many lines that all graduations were lost. "I might become very devout," I said. "Anyway, I will pray for you. "I had always expected to become devout. All my family died very devout. But somehow it does not come." "It's too early." "Maybe it is too late. Perhaps I have outlived my religious feeling." "My own comes only at night." "Then too you are in love. Do not forget that is a religious feeling." So here, again, we find Frederick defined as the sleepless man, and the relation established between secular love and Divine love. In the end, with the death of Catherine, Frederick discovers that the attempt to find a substitute for universal meaning in the limited meaning of the personal relationship is doomed to failure. It is doomed because it is liable to all the accidents of a world in which human beings are like the ants running back and forth on a log bumring in a campfire and in which death is, as Catherine says immediately before her own death, "just a dirty trick." But this is not to deny the value of the effort, or to deny the value of the dis- cipline, the code, the stoic endurance, the things which make it true - or half true - that "nothing ever happens to the brave." This question of the characteristic discipline takes us back to the beginning of the book, and to the context from which Freder- ick's effort arises. We have already mentioned the contrast be- tween the officers of the mess and the priest. It is a contrast based on the man who is aware of the issue of meaning in life and those who are unaware of it, who give themselves over to the mere flow of accident, the contrast between the disciplined and the undis- ciplined. But the contrast is not merely between the priest and the This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ROBERT PENN WARREN 23 officers. Frederick's friend, the surgeon Rinaldi, is another who is on the same "side" of the contrast as the priest. He may go to the brothel with his brother officers, he may even bait the priest a little, but his personal relationship with Frederick indicates his affilia- tions; he is one of the initiate. Furthermore, he has the discipline of his profession, and as we have seen, in the Hemingway world, the discipline which seems to be merely technical, the style of the artist or the form of the athlete or bull fighter, may be an index to a moral value. "Already," he says, "I am only happy when I am working." (Already because the seeking of pleasure in sensa- tion is inadequate for Rinaldi.yf 7 K L V S R L Q W D S S H D U V P R U H V K D U S O y in the remarks about the doctor who first attends to Frederick's wounded leg. He is incompetent and does not wish to take the responsibility for a decision. Before he came back three doctors came into the room. I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend to you a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with suc- cess. These were three such doctors. In contrast with them there is Dr. Valentini, who is competent, who is willing to take responsibility, and who, as a kind of mark of his role, speaks the same lingo, with the same bantering, ironical tone, as Rinaldi - the tone which is the mark of the initiate. So we have the world of the novel divided into two groups, the initiate and the uninitiate, the aware and the unaware, the disciplined and the undisciplined. In the first group are Freder- ick, Catherine, Rinaldi, Valentini, Count Greffi, the old man who cut the paper silhouettes "for pleasure," and Passini, Manera, and the other ambulance men in Frederick's command. In the second group are the officers of the mess, the incompetent doctors, the "legitimate hero" Ettore, and the "patriots" all the people who do not know what is really at stake, who are decided by the big words, who do not have the discipline. They are the messy people, This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 24 KENYON REVIEW the people who surrender to the flow and illusion of things. It is this second group who provide the context of the novel, and more especially the context from which Frederick moves toward his final complete awareness. The final awareness means, as we have said, that the individual is thrown back upon his private discipline and his private capacity to endure. The hero cuts himself off from the herd, the confused world, which symbolically appears as the routed army at Caporetto. And, as Malcolm Cowley has pointed out, the plunge into the flooded Tagliamento, when Frederick escapes from the battle police, has the significance of a rite. By this "baptism" Frederick is reborn into another world; he comes out into the world of the man alone, no longer supported by and involved in society. Anger was washed away in the river along with my obligation. Although that ceased when the carabiniere put his hands on my col- lar. I would like to have had the uniform off although I did not care much about the outward forms. I had taken off the stars, but that was for convenience. It was no point of honor. I was not against them. I was through. I wished them all the luck. There were the good ones, and the brave ones, and the calm ones and the sensible ones, and they deserved it. But it was not my show any more and I wished this bloody train would get to Maestre and I would eat and stop thinking. So Frederick, by a decision, does what the boy Nick, in In Our Time, does as the result of the accident of a wound. He makes a "separate peace." And from the waters of the flooded Taglia- mento arises the Hemingway hero in his purest form, with human history and obligation washed away, ready to enact the last phase of his appropriate drama, and learn from his inevitable defeat the lesson of lonely fortitude. 3. This is not the time to attempt to give a final evaluation of Hemingway's work as a whole or even of this particular novel- if there is ever a time for a "final" evaluation. But we may touch This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ROBERT PENN WARREN 25 on some of the objections which have been brought against his work. First, there is the objection that his work is immoral or dirty or disgusting. This objection appeared in various quarters against A Farewell to Arms at the time of its first publication. For instance, Robert Herrick, himself a respected novelist, wrote that if sup- pression were to be justified at all it would be justified in this case. He said that the book had no significance, was merely a "lustful indulgence," and smelled of the "boudoir," and summarized his view by calling it "garbage." That objection has for the most part died out, but its echoes can still be occasionally heard, and now and then, at rare intervals, some bigot or highminded but uninstructed moralist will object to the inclusion of A Farewell to Arms in a college course. The answer to such an objection is fundamentally an answer to the charge that the book has no meaning. The answerer must seek to establish the fact that the book does deal seriously with a moral and philosophical issue, which, for better or worse, does ex- ist in the modern world in substantially the terms presented by Hemingway. This means that the book, even if it does not end with a solution which is generally acceptable, still embodies a moral effort and is another document of the human will to achieve ideal values. As for the bad effect it may have on some readers, the best answer is perhaps to be found in a quotation from Thomas Hardy, who is now sanctified but whose most famous novels, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, once suffered the at- tacks of the dogmatic moralists, and one of whose books was burned by a bishop: Of the effects of such sincere presentation on weak minds, when the courses of the characters are not exemplary and the rewards and punishments ill adjusted to deserts, it is not our duty to consider too closely. A novel which does moral injury to a dozen imbeciles, and has bracing results upon intellects of normal vigor, can justify its existence; and probably a novel was never written by the purest- This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 26 KENYON REVIEW minded author for which there could not be found some moral in- valid or other whom it was capable of harming. Second, there is the objection that Hemingway's work, especial- ly of the period before To Have and To Have Not, has no social relevance, that it is off the main stream of modern life, and that it has no concern with the economic structure of society. Critics who hold this general view regard Hemingway, like Joseph Conrad and perhaps like Henry James, as an exotic. There are several possible lines of retort to this objection. One line is well stated in the following passage if we substitute the name of Hemingway for Conrad: Thus it is no reproach to Conrad that he does not concern him- self at all with the economic and social background underlying hu- man relationships in modern civilization, for he never sets out to study those relationships. The Marxists cannot accuse him of cow- ardice or falsification, because in this case the charge is not relevant [though it might be relevant to To, Have and To Have Not or to For Whom the Bell Tolls]. That, from the point of view of the man with a theory, there are accidents in history, no one can deny. And if a writer chooses to discuss those accidents rather than the events which follow the main stream of historical causation, the economic or other determinist can only shrug his shoulder and maintain that these events are less instructive to the students than are the major events which he chooses to study; but he cannot accuse the writer of falsehood or distortion.2 That much is granted by one of the ablest critics of the group who would find Hemingway an exotic. But a second line of retort would fix on the word instructive in the foregoing passage, and would ask what kind of instruction, if any, is to be expected of fic- tion, as fiction. Is the kind of instruction expected of fiction in di- rect competition, at the same level, with the kind of instruction offered in Political Science I or Economics II ? If that is the case, then out with Shakespeare and Keats and in with Upton Sinclair. 2. David Daiches: Fiction in the Afodern World. This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ROBERT PENN WARREN 27 Perhaps instruction is not a relevant word, after all, for this case. This is a very thorny and debatable question, but it can be ventured that what good fiction gives us is the stimulation of a powerful image of human nature trying to fulfill itself and not in- struction in an abstract sense. The economic and the political man are important aspects of human nature and may well constitute part of the materials of fiction. But the economic or political man is not the complete man and other concerns may still be important enough to engage worthily the attention of a writer - such con- cerns as love, death, courage, the point of honor, and the moral scruple. A man does not only have to live with other men in terms of economic and political arrangements; he has to live with them in terms of moral arrangements, and he has to live with him- self, he has to define himself. It can truly be said that these con- cerns are all inter-related in fact, but it might be dangerously dog- matic to insist that a writer should not bring one aspect into sharp, dramatic focus. And it might be dangerously dogmatic to insist that Heming- way's ideas are not relevant to modem life. The mere fact that they exist and have stirred a great many people is a testimony to their relevance. Or to introduce a variation on that theme, it might be dogmatic to object to his work on the ground that he has few basic ideas. The history of literature seems to show that good artists may have very few basic ideas. They may have many ideas, but the ideas do not lead a life of democratic give-and-take, of genial camaraderie. No, there are usually one or two basic, ob- sessive ones. Like the religious reformer Savonarola, the artist may say: "Le mie cose erano poche e grandi" - my ideas were few and grand. And the ideas of the artist are grand because they are intensely felt, intensely realized - not because, by objective stand- ards, by public, statistical standards, "important." No, that kind of public, statistical importance may be a condition of their being grand but is not of the special essence of their grandeur. (Per- haps not even the condition - perhaps the grandeur inheres in This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 28 KENYON REVIEW the fact that the artistic work shows us a parable of meaning how idea is felt and how passion becomes idea through order.yf An artist may need few basic ideas, but in assessing his work we must introduce another criterion in addition to that of inten- sity. We must introduce the criterion of area. In other words, his basic ideas do not operate in splendid isolation; to a greater or lesser degree, they operate in terms of their conquest of other ideas. Or again differently, the focus is a focus of experience, and the area of experience involved gives us another criterion of condition, the criterion of area. Perhaps an example would be helpful here. We have said that Hemingway is concerned with the scruple of honor, that this is a basic idea in his work. But we find that he ap- plies this idea to a relatively small area of experience. In fact, we never see a story in which the issue involves the problem of defini- tion of the scruple, or we never see a story in which honor calls for a slow, grinding, day-to-day conquest of nagging difficulties. In other words, the idea is submitted to the test of a relatively small area of experience, to experience of a hand-picked sort, and to characters of a limited range. But within that range, within the area in which he finds the congenial material and in which competing ideas do not intrude themselves too strongly, Hemingway's expressive capacity is very powerful and the degree of intensity is very great. He is con- cerned not to report variety of human nature or human situation, or to analyze the forces operating in society, but to communicate a certain feeling about, a certain attitude toward, a special issue. That is, he is essentially a lyric rather than a dramatic writer, and for the lyric writer virtue depends upon the intensity with which the personal vision is rendered rather than upon the creation of a variety of characters whose visions are in conflict among them- selves. And though Hemingway has not furnished-and never in- tended to furnish-document and diagnosis of our age, he has given us one of its most compelling symbols. This content downloaded from 132.174.254.102 on Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:21:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms