ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A NOTE

By HARRY SYLVESTER

SOMETIMES in Paris after the war and before he had had any recognition, Hemingway was quite hungry. Although, among other things, he had written and was trying to sell "The Undefeated," "Fifty Grand" and "My Old Man," three of the finest short stories in the language, he could not sell them. Querschnitt did finally buy "The Undefeated" for $150 and had it translated into German. But there was a time before that when Hemingway stopped writing short stories (editors sent them back saying they liked his "conte" or "sketch" but would like to see a short story) and wrote an article on bullfighting. It was probably the first definitive, though brief, work on that subject in English. Hemingway sent it, accompanied by snapshots he had risked his life in the bull-ring to make, to *Vanity Fair*. That precious magazine returned everything with a letter saying it was not interested in bull-fighting. Finally, things became so bad that Hemingway's friend, John Dos Passos, sold his typewriter so that they could eat.

Hemingway wrote "The Sun Also Rises" in five weeks and rewrote it in six more. Mr. Thomas Beer has remarked that "the history of a triumph is always dull." To ignore the critical aspect of Hemingway's triumph with this book and to recite only its financial ramifications may make it less dull.

Out of that distillation of the despair and tragedy of a generation, Hemingway made about $70,000. Almost all of it went into a trust fund for a dependent of his. When one of the more blatant American monthlies cabled him—after the triumph, of course—an offer of $35,000 for the serial rights to his next novel and $2,500 apiece for his next ten short stories, Hemingway refused the offer. He felt that his writing might suffer if he knew that just anything he might turn out, good or bad, would command that much money. Amazed and horrified, the magazine sent one of its editors, a personable young woman, to Paris with orders to sign Hemingway to contracts for his work. Hemingway was broke again, but he bought the young lady her lunch, listened to her politely for some time and sent her back to America without a contract.

*Vanity Fair* — also after Hemingway had a name — wrote to him, offering $1,200 for any short piece he might care to do on the bull-fight. Hemingway didn't answer the letter. This characteristic disregard of money is one of the many things about Hemingway that annoy many of his contemporaries. One more example of it will suffice for my purpose. The story of the sale of

"A Farewell to Arms" to the cinema might prove libelous if told in full. After it had been sold to the picture people in the form of a not very good play by Laurence Stallings, and Stallings and Hemingway split $80,000 with an agent, Hemingway decided that the half-hearted consent he had given to the sale should not have been given. But the damage was done. The picture people offered him $2,500 a week on a ten-week contract. Hemingway knew that when Hollywood brings a major author to California to "advise" as they film his work, he does simply nothing, although his presence is considered to have given tacit consent to whatever butchery the great minds there perform on his work. Hemingway refused the offer. Hollywood raised the ante to $3,500 a week and Hemingway refused again. Amidst, one may imagine, a chorus of "oi-oi's" the ante was raised to $4,500 a week for ten weeks. When Hemingway twice refused this last offer, Hollywood pulled itself together and went ahead with the film.

It is conceivable that such a man might make a dangerous enemy, that such a man believes in the authenticity if not yet in the greatness of his own art. It is necessary to state again that Hemingway is a very fine artist. There are several reasons why it is necessary to reiterate the fact of his fine artistry: he has many enemies, most of them members of the literati and most of them moved by a single thing, jealousy. They say his work "dates." They say he is not interested in the "class struggle." (The American exquisite, Mr. Edmund Wilson, particularly insists on this.) They think his many enthusiasms are at best "quaint"; at worst "affected." Their own enthusiasms are affected; therefore Hemingway's must be. . . . It is all very logical.

Puritans, of whom the Catholic Church in America has more than a fair share, condemn Hemingway as an artist because of his subject-matter, as if subject-matter went more than only a very little way toward determining a man's artistry. People without subtlety, people who are overawed by purple writing, hack-writers, say that they cannot understand him or that anyone can write that simple stuff.

It would be impertinent after so many competent critics have done so and, addressing the audience of *THE COMMONWEAL*, irrelevant to attempt to explain just why Ernest Hemingway is a fine artist. Certainly other writers have written more consistently upon great themes. (All the bad Catholic and Communist writers have.) The thing that differentiates art from non-art is form,

the reason why Thou hast strewn such a tremen-
dous number of sorrows over the world—only
that some, who love, may be fructified! Thou art
like a strange sower who sows immeasurable
quantities of seed with both hands, casting it to
the four winds and over the whole meadow, solely
to make sure that one or the other grain of wheat
comes up. That does, one must admit, bear fruit
one hundred fold. Yes, Thy prodigality is ad-
mirable; but behold, it does nevertheless involve
the suffering of Thy creatures. Must millions be
tortured so that one may become wholly mature
and tall and godlike?

Thou hast builded upon sorrow not merely the
kingdom of life, but the kingdom of the spirit as
well. Was that necessary? It is true that our
earthbound souls are rooted deep in the soil of
bodily life. Accordingly they cannot arise except
upon the foundations of life and therewith also
of suffering. This I fully understand. But why is
that which is purest and freest in our souls also
subject to this terrible law? Behold all knowledge
means sadness to us; everything we learn destroys
another paradise. All development leads to a fall,
precisely because it provides a height from which
to fall.

Thus even the realm of pure love, Thy love,
is based upon pain. As often as I become
acquainted with a human being, led by Thee to a
friendship in Thee and for Thy sake, then suffer-
ing soon looms like a giant between us. Everyone
that loves must suffer unless he have control over
Thine infinitude. And who could comprehend and
bear with that? Our love is also something un-
bounded—unbounded desire to give. And as soon
as it is cramped into the limitations attendant
upon all created things, it must suffer. For this
reason Thine own Son was compelled to suffer,
when out of love He had become a man. He
could not spend His days in unclouded happiness
and tranquillity. That was utterly impossible ...
for He was a lover. And the greatest agony is
that caused by the fire of love. Thee alone this
fire cannot injure, because it and Thou are one.
The whole of love's fire—that Thou art, and
therefore we must suffer most by reason of Thee,
of Thy coming and Thine intimacy, and of Thy
going and Thy remaining distant. Thou art our
greatest sorrow. . . .

Thus suffering surrounds and pours into us from all sides, everywhere we go. It is present and grows steadily, no matter what we do. It grows with our love and with our hate; it grows through goodness and also through wickedness. It is like the dust, the grey dust, that is churned up on all the highways of Thy world. As soon as we move a little we suffer; and if we should like to remain motionless, we would immediately be pushed from somewhere and hurled to some place, and therewith suffering would rise up in whole clouds. The

bodies Thou hast cre-
ter what they do; in
themselves together
they rush apart like
warmth. And in the
creatures and even Thee
duce pain, no matter

Thou hast created suffering. Thou hast willed
that it should be, and not merely to serve as a deli-
cate and hardly detectable spice of life, keeping
that life fresh and healthy. No, Thou hast made
oceans of suffering, orgies of pain. And I cannot
see why they were needed to preserve Thy world.
Thou hast walked over the suffering of all indi-
vidual creatures toward the achievement of Thy
world plan, just as Thou hast gone ahead regard-
less of individual lives. Thou hadst Thy reasons
for creating these seas of suffering, and Thou hast
created them. Thou walkest across these seas,
which are made of tears. And sometimes the
storms lash the water as high as heaven. . . .

When cities collapse and waves of conflagration
flare above the ruins, when the water in the houses
and the streets begins to boil, when every creature
begins to do the opposite of what he really ought
to do—the solid earth wavers, and the water
burns, and the support-giving walls and pillars
oppress—

But all this is only a faint image of the whole,
tremendous, indescribable ache that forever and
unceasingly rests on the quiet, wide foundations of
the souls of men!

Lord, everything is dipped in sorrow excepting
Thee. Thou givest the sea of sorrow permission
to toss its waves as high as the foot of Thy throne,
into the very presence of Thine august Majesty;
and everything that proceeds from Thee is auto-
matically swallowed up in those dark, boiling
floods. Thou Thyself, when Thou didst deter-
mine to come down into this world, wast con-
strained to dive into the waters of sorrow that
surround Thee.

Lord, Thou hast created pain. There are per-
sons who know everything, and who also master
Thy towering ideas and decisions so well that they
can map them out very neatly. They explain all
and prove to me that nothing else is possible and
that everything that is is for the best. But I have
no love for these men who explain all things.
And least of all do I find pleasure in those who
explain Thee, who justify Thee, and find a motive
for every action of Thine. I prefer to admit to
Thee that I do not understand Thee. I do not
understand why Thou hast created pain — why
Thou hast created so much pain, so much scream-
ing, maddening, useless pain. I prostrate myself
before Thy majesty. I am all Thine. But I do
not dare lift my eyes to Thee just now. There is
too much sadness and mourning in my eyes. I can-
not face Thee now.

October 30, 1936

The Commonweal

11

not theme, although theme can make good art,
great. It is enough to point out that Hemingway
is still a "subtle doctor" of words in a time of
unsubtlety; that he is the master of the unstressed
implication; that he uses simple and common
words but in new and vital combinations. He has
written—and here his invariably unsuccessful imi-
tators have had their fall—that "a writer who
omits things because he does not know them only
makes hollow places in his writing"; but "if a
writer of prose knows enough about what he is
writing about he may omit things that he knows
[italics mine] and the reader, if the writer is
writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those
things as strongly as though the writer stated
them." He insists that the reader come up to his
level; he will not descend to the reader's.

Which is already too much of an apologia for
the art of a man who needs none. If there are
still intelligent people who cannot recognize this
man's art as genuine (which is the most one can
say of the art of a contemporary) then I am very
sorry for them, but I am not going to try to ex-
plain why it is genuine. As for his enthusiasms
and for the sneering at them by the literati—it is
always good to remember that the literati either
are or would like to be sophisticated. Heming-
way's interest in hunting, fishing, fighting, drink-
ing; in boats, Spain and children; in the Negro
press, the very rich, guns and the speed of por-
poises indicates no mere childish delight in the
novel or the strange; the thing is that he has lost
no enthusiasm, not because he fails of penetration
or analysis, but because that penetration and that
analysis of his is sharper and goes deeper into old
and new things than do those of his contempo-
RARIES, and there is a constant process of discovery
and appreciation of the hidden values of even the
very familiar things.

One hears by word of mouth that Hemingway
has become a Catholic. This is inaccurate: Hem-
ingway has returned to the Roman Catholic
Church, in which he was baptized some years ago.
His reasons for leaving the Church are his own
and may come out if he ever chooses to do an
autobiography. I feel free only to speak of one of
them and to make a surmise regarding another.

When, after being on the bum as a hobo since
he was fifteen, after working in factories and
fighting at smokers for a meal, Hemingway found
his way to Italy at the start of the World War,
the Italians welcomed this American still in his
teens and made him an officer. Some time later
they also took 251 pieces of trench mortar shell
out of one of his knees, but that is another story.
While waiting for zero hour to attack the Aus-
trians, the men under Hemingway, like the rest
of the Italian army under similar circumstances,
drank a mixture of whisky and ether to key them
up. Zero hour came and the attack was called off.

Hemingway's men, on edge and half-savage from
the strain and the drink, broke discipline and went
to a village behind the lines and proceeded to
attack all the women in it. Hemingway, although
his own life until then had shown him many un-
pleasant things, was sickened; and when he was
commended the next day instead of reprimanded
by his superiors for allowing the men to find an
outlet for their savagery, it is not unreasonable to
believe that the boy thought there might be no
God. And when the exact same experience in
every major detail was repeated the following
night and morning, he possibly felt quite sure
there was no God.

He was away from America for eleven years.
After the war he spent many years in Spain, which
was not always a country for a Catholic with a
weak faith to look deeply into. And now that
although Hemingway has come—by whatever
weary way he himself only knows—to accept again
the spiritual body of the Church, he is still dis-
trustful of at least part of the corporal body of
the Church.

Hemingway goes to Mass every Sunday. When
he does not like a sermon, he goes out of the
church or chapel until the sermon is over. (No,
not to smoke a cigarette. He doesn't smoke. He
is very proud of his sense of smell, which enables
him to scent game in the woods at a distance, and
that is one reason he does not smoke.) He is of
the Church, but not dedicated to it. He is dedi-
cated to nothing but his family and his art. He
will never be dedicated to the Church in the same
puerile sense that Communist writers are dedi-
cated to Communism. But some day he may write
the first great Catholic novel in the English lan-
guage. This has not been done, of course. There
has been, in the last couple of years, some ap-
proach made to the effort and two or three Cath-
olic novels by Americans have at least been rated
of some distinction.

There are still very few good prose writers
coming out of Catholic colleges. It is still most
sensible to look toward Ernest Hemingway for
the mythical novel. The fact is that he is the only
Catholic among those great living artists whose
medium is the English language; and that Morley
Callaghan is the only Catholic writer whose place
among them seems at all imminent. Belloc, the
Walshs, Knox, Leslie and the other few good
Catholic writers today are primarily scholars.
I am not talking about the Catholic lack of schol-
ars, although that is bad enough; I am referring
to the lack of artists, which is worse. Much worse.

It is Hemingway's love of and belief in reserve
and briefness which led Mr. Wyndham Lewis, in
the only bad article the *American Review* ever
published, to call his characters dull, leaden and
frustrated as well as inarticulate. Mr. Aldous
Huxley also complains about the lack of culture

12

The Commonweal

October 30, 1936

in Hemingway's books. Now, it so happens that Hemingway believes a novel should be about people, not about ideas or culture; and he writes about lost people, bitter people, violent people, none of whom are as articulate as, say, English exquisites. Comments on art, Hemingway believes, should be reserved for conversation or the essay, of which he has produced some admirable examples. Mr. Huxley has long been noted for a strange, bastard sort of writing, neither novel nor essay, in which the characters give vent to noble sentiments, comments on literature, music and painting and anything else Mr. Huxley happens to want to include. Now the novel should concern people, not culture, but as Hemingway has pointed out, Mr. Huxley's form may be explained by the fact novels frequently make a good deal of money for their authors, while essays are modestly paid for. Or could it be that these two excellent Englishmen are lacking in subtlety?

Fine words and noble sentiments are not pre-
requisites or marks of sentience or intelligence
and I doubt that Mr. Huxley ever wrote a story
as sensitive as "The Undefeated," which is about
an old and very brave bull-fighter, but an amaz-
ingly uncultured and inarticulate one; or that any
of Mr. Huxley's characters was ever as sensitive
as the boy in "My Old Man." The fact is that
Hemingway is a fine artist and his artistry hap-
pens to include culture. Mr. Huxley and Mr.
Lewis are merely cultured. Because that is all
they have, it is on the surface of their writing at
all times, it is their only yardstick; and they resent
the artistry of a man whose simplicity, reticence,
subtlety and knowledge of many, many people—
including a few cultured ones—enables him to say
all the things Mr. Huxley and Mr. Lewis do and
much more, in fewer and simpler words than they
use. Possibly in the old days they would have had
Hemingway burned as a witch; certainly Mr.
Huxley and Mr. Lewis are puzzled and angry at
the man's ability; so Mr. Lewis calls him an "ox,"
and Mr. Huxley—with, one may fancy, just a
trace of a lisp—says that "it is not at all un-
common now to find intelligent and cultured peo-
ple doing their best to feign stupidity. . . ."

Gertrude Stein was more crude. Knowing
Hemingway better than the Englishmen, she indi-
cated in her autobiography that Hemingway
lacked courage and was a poor boxer for all his
talk of it. She wanted to hurt him and she did,
much more than Mr. Huxley and Mr. Lewis did
or could. But she was no less inaccurate than
they, although I suspect that she was moved more
by a jealous malice than by ignorance. For Ernest
Hemingway is a very brave man and, knowing
him, anyone must be a fool or a liar to say other-
wise. His boxing ability is something else and,
while I know a good deal less than Miss Stein
about writing, I know as much more about boxing

than she does. A fair estimate of Ernest Heming-
way as a boxer today is this:

He has a fine left hand and a passable right and
can hit and block very well with either, although
he has been slowed down and handicapped by a
bad knee, a bad eye and a deeply scarred deltoid
muscle which pains a good deal when he blocks
with it. From having watched repeatedly the
great English boxer, Ted Lewis, and from having
boxed frequently in gyms with the late Harry
Greb, Hemingway knows almost every dirty trick
in boxing and, if an opponent wants to lower the
level of a fight, will not hesitate to use them. His
endurance is not good, usually, but he can cut you
badly with his straight left and, if given a chance
to get set, probably knock you out with his right.

Three assorted members of the literati during
the time since Miss Stein's autobiography ap-
peared, have believed Miss Stein and picked fist
fights with Hemingway, with disastrous results to
themselves. The last of the trio, a bad poet but a
big man physically, fought Hemingway in Key
West last winter and afterward was confined to
his room for five days with a day and night nurse.

I conclude with his own concluding words of
"Death in the Afternoon":

The great thing is to last and get your work done
and see and hear and learn and understand; and
write when there is something that you know; and
not before; and not too damned much after. Let
those who want to save the world if you can get to
see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you
make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The
thing to do is work and learn to make it. No. It is
not enough of a book, but still there were a few things
to be said. There were a few practical things to
be said.

There are more things to be said about him.
A lot more. And I hope someone will say them
soon in longer, better and more permanent form.
Meanwhile "there were a few practical things to
be said."

Aquarium

Here in a glassed-in smaller ocean glide
the iridescent scales, the scarlet fin,
the restless lovely silver-spattered side,
the flashing minnows exquisite and thin.
Here the inhabitants of the emerald sea
swim under lesser waves, and such small tide
as here occurs, not by the moon's bright mastery
is driven. Among the weed-strewn rocks abide
the rare fishes, opal, stroked with blue.
And all this silent beauty, floating, strange,
bearing the colors that have shuttled through
the gloom above the ocean-bed, will range
forever in my mind, forever be
my heart's remembrance of the deeper sea.

FRANCES FROST.