Hemingway the Painter
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 the right to go somewhere else and as we had always gone.… 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.
HEMINGWAY, Green Hills of Africa
One of the last photographs of Hemingway shows him wandering a road in Idaho and kicking a can. He is surrounded by grim mountains. He looks morose, he is evidently in his now-usual state of exasperation, and he is alone. The emptiness of Idaho is the only other presence in the picture.
With his gift for locating the most symbolic place for himself, Hemingway was bound to end up in Idaho. And not just for the hunting and fishing. At every stage of his life he found himself a frontier appropriate to his fresh needs as a sportsman and his ceremonial needs as a writer. Only Henry James among his significant predecessors made such a literary cult of travel. James even in his sacred Europe never went very far. He certainly never sought the last possible frontier.
Most American writer-wanderers, like Melville the sailor, Mark Twain the mobile printer, correspondent, and lecturer, went where they were forced to go to make a living. Hemingway for the most part chose where he wanted to go. That was the impression he managed to leave. He did spend his early summers “up in Michigan” because his family summered there. Right after the First World War he was sent by the Toronto Star to report still more fighting between Turks and Greeks. But his conjunction of Michigan and the Balkans in In Our Time made these startling stories read as if he had chosen these experiences. There was a point to being Ernest Hemingway and to writing like Ernest Hemingway. Everything was under control like one of his sentences. He was an entirely free man. He had shaped his own career.
To summer up in Michigan was wonderful. It was also wonderful to sit in a café when Paris was “the best town for a writer to be” and, nursing a single café crème, to write the first Nick Adams stories in a blue-backed notebook with the stub of a pencil you shaved with a little pencil sharpener as you went along. Sharpening a pencil with a knife was too wasteful. Remembering how poor you had been, thirty years later in A Moveable Feast, you also made the point that “wasteful” referred to other people’s prose, not E. Hemingway’s. And when and where else was poverty so easy to bear that a young couple with baby could live on five dollars a day and go skiing in Austria when a story was finished? It also helped to skip lunch because on an empty stomach all sorts of hidden details in the Cézannes in the Luxembourg became sharper, easier to grasp for your writing when you were learning “to do the country like Cézanne.”
Any place Hemingway sojourned in, any place he passed through, somehow took on Hemingway’s attributes as an artist. He was the most extraordinary appropriator. He learned to omit many things for his famous style, but a trout stream in Michigan or a street in Paris came rhythmically to belong to Hemingway alone. Michigan became all primitive, brutish, but above all naked, like the starkness of a Hemingway story. Paris was electric, crowded, but above all derisory like The Sun Also Rises. No one after Maurice Utrillo established such an intimacy with Paris streets as Hemingway the foreigner did just by the loving repetition of certain names—Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, Place de la Contrescarpe. And there were always the knowing little references—“The dancing-club was a bal musette in the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève”—that established Hemingway’s ability to make a part of his page anything that he had first absorbed as a stranger in Paris.
He was ambitious, he was shrewd, he seemed to have worked out in advance just what he needed to get from a place, and he became contemptuous of others as soon as he had learned it. So much command of experience belonged to an imperial race. Defying his Victorian parents, and a year out of high school, he put himself on the line, went to the Italian front as a Red Cross volunteer and got himself gloriously wounded. What other solidly middle-class boy from one of “our best families in Oak Park” could at nineteen have won for himself such lasting images of war, fright, and death?
And who but Hemingway would have so indelibly recorded his wounding as his moment of truth?
Then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died.
From now on it was his war, war was his. Reading Tolstoy’s Sebastopol stories while hunting in Green Hills of Africa made him think of riding a bicycle down the Boulevard de Sébastopol in the rain:
And I thought about Tolstoy and about what a great advantage an experience of war was to a writer. It was one of the major subjects and certainly one of the hardest to write truly of and those writers who had not seen it were always very jealous and tried to make it seem unimportant, or abnormal, or a disease as a subject, while, really, it was just something quite irreplaceable that they had missed.
His wounding was a shock that went straight into Hemingway’s early stories and fables of the war. In Our Time taught him to make set passages out of the body’s response to a particular blow. Mastery lay in the moment’s triumph over danger; in life as in art, Hemingway needed one deliberate trial of himself after another. He made a point of seeking out violence. Clearly accident-prone, he retained his ability to turn every new accident into the confrontation of something or someone. In his bilious last years he was to say that it was good for a writer in despair to hang himself and “then be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.”
This need of risk, of the ultimate challenge, became something that only an international sportsman could buy for himself. In Green Hills of Africa (1935) he was still boasting to a chance acquaintance:
“And you know what you want?”
“Absolutely, and I get it all the time.”
This was the mark of a special time and a particular ego. Only the florid buccaneers of the age of enterprise had talked that way. Hemingway’s crushing sense of self sought not wealth but fame—absolute distinction, to be top dog, the undoubted original and pacemaker for literary prose in his time. Writing was everything. And the journey that Hemingway undertook, the journey into the country of the dead that Ezra Pound idly and occasionally thought he was writing in the Cantos, made possible that extraordinary concentration of line and progression of effect that no matter how often we reread “The Battler,” “Fifty Grand,” “Big Two-Hearted River,” can still make us hold our breath. No other American “in our time” so captured the actual physical element. No one else so charged up the reader, for no one else was so charged up by the act of writing itself.
Nick walked back up the ties to where his pack lay in the cinders beside the railway track. He was happy. He adjusted the pack harness around the bundle, pulling straps tight, slung the pack on his back, got his arms through the shoulder straps and took some of the pull off his shoulders by leaning his forehead against the wide band of the tump-line. Still, it was too heavy. It was much too heavy.
So Hemingway caused “real” and “concrete” to become the first essentials in the act of writing. He put life back on the page, made us see, feel, and taste the gift of life in its unalloyed and irreducible reality. It may be that all we really have and know is our consciousness, that the alternative is something we know nothing about, that the livingness of being alive is the inescapable drama of our existence. Not many writers have incarnated this in their work, have emphasized the angle of their particular consciousness so that our experience of their work becomes as elemental as their own grasp of existence. To read Hemingway was always to feel more alive. The spontaneous reaction was pleasure from the cunning way sentences fall, from the bright echoing separateness of the words, from every picture a passage put into the mind. One was brought close to some exceptional vividness.
Of all the many things Hemingway appropriated, the most celebrated was his own experience. How he hammered any triviality into place, kept it luminous with his particular gift for shining in his own light! This was what he hungered for beyond anything else, what he kept from dying. With his particular talent for saving and treasuring his experiences, for turning life into the economy of art, he brought into his sacred circle many small things insubstantial and fugitive. It was typical of him to call them “rain” and to celebrate “rain” as what did not vanish when secured in the style of Ernest Hemingway.
His minute details bring us into a world dense but never thick like that of the great nineteenth-century novels—a world stark, each detail oddly magnified, so that the bombardment gives us a sense of being violated. Like many startling achievements of modernism, this can be felt first as pain. In A Farewell to Arms there is the confrontation on the bank of the Isonzo between the Italian battle police and the officers separated from their troops in the retreat at Caporetto. The scene excites a quiver of terror when the questioning of the hapless officers is followed by their immediate execution. It is night. The lights being flashed by the battle police into face after face bring to mind the unnaturally bright faces of the condemned being shot by the light of torches in Goya’s Disasters of War.
They took me down behind the line of officers below the road toward a group of people in a field by the river bank. As we walked toward them shots were fired. I saw flashes of the rifles and heard the reports. We came up to the group. There were four officers standing together, with a man in front of them with a carabiniere on each side of him. A group of men were standing guarded by carabinieri. Four other carabinieri stood near the questioning officers, leaning on their carbines. They were wide-hatted carabinieri. The two who had me shoved me in with the group waiting to be questioned. I looked at the man the officers were questioning. He was the fat gray-haired little lieutenant-colonel they had taken out of the column. The questioners had all the efficiency, coldness and command of themselves of Italians who are firing and are not being fired on.
“Your brigade?”
He told them.
“Regiment?”
He told them.
“Why are you not with your regiment?”
He told them.
“Do you not know that an officer should be with his troops?”
He did.
That was all. Another officer spoke.
“It is you and such as you that have let the barbarians onto the sacred soil of the fatherland.”
“I beg your pardon,” said the lieutenant-colonel.
“It is because of treachery such as yours that we have lost the fruits of victory.”
“Have you ever been in a retreat?” the lieutenant-colonel asked.
“Italy should never retreat.”
We stood there in the rain and listened to this. We were facing the officers and the prisoner stood in front and a little to one side of us.
“If you are going to shoot me,” the lieutenant-colonel said, “please shoot me at once without further questioning. The questioning is stupid.” He made the sign of the cross. The officers spoke together. One wrote something on a pad of paper.
“Abandoned his troops, ordered to be shot,” he said.
The “picture” is certainly very distinct—and so is the paragraphing. The “fat gray-haired little lieutenant-colonel” is on that page forever, saying with perfect contempt, “Please shoot me at once without further questioning. The questioning is stupid.” Hemingway certainly learned to parody Italian, Spanish, and French with affection and respect. Stupido is a word of perfect contempt. Generations of students, brought up on modernism as the latest (but not the last) academic tradition, have by now learned to speak of reduction, foreshortening, irony in order to indicate that Hemingway makes us see, brings us close to, that scene by the river. The seeing is all-important; Hemingway learned many things from painters and from extraordinarily visual war scenes in Stendhal, Tolstoy, Crane, that enabled him to get Caporetto just right. But the key to the scene is Hemingway’s need to show that while the questioning and the shooting are mistaken, totally unjust, as hideously wrong as anything can be, this is what stoical men “in our time,” like the fat little lieutenant-colonel, accept—because they will always be superior to the stupido.
Hemingway had many gifts. His greatest gift, the foundation of all his marvellous pictorial effects, was his sense of some enduring injustice, of some fundamental wrongness at the heart of things, to which an American can still rise, and which he will endure (and describe) as a hero. “There is a great disorder under heaven,” the Chinese say. Today they draw political cheer from this, since masses oppressed for centuries learn resignation. Hemingway was an American from the Middle West, “the valley of democracy.” He was brought up on the old American religion of the self-sufficient individual. He knew that the public world was pushing him and everyone else toward an abyss. But he still had a private code in the twenties that, as Lady Brett said in The Sun Also Rises about “deciding not to be a bitch,” sort of replaced one’s religion. When repeated often enough in the same tone of discovery, the code became one’s politics. Of course the code did not survive into the thirties, the Hitler-Stalin era, and still another world war. What in the twenties was pronounced with so much startled self-approval as a form of conduct was really a lean, wary style of writing, Hemingway’s style. This style thrived on “the disasters of war” but somehow saved a few exceptional people from destruction. It was all the law and all the prophets.
Hemingway’s great teacher in Paris, Gertrude Stein, was as resentful of him when he became famous as he was of her for condescending to him as she did to everybody else. Unlike Hemingway, whose sense of himself was so imperious that he became violent when he felt himself slighted in the least, Stein was never “insecure.” For the most part she operated so much on a personal and domestic level that even her early writing became as indistinct as the message from the other side at a séance. Unlike Hemingway, who always conflated the personal and the political, his style and the world, Stein talked with an aphoristic brilliance that she disdained to put into her writing. Better, much better, than her taking from a French garage owner (contemptuous of his mechanics) the saying that Hemingway put at the head of The Sun Also Rises—“You are all a lost generation”—was her saying that in the twentieth century nothing is in agreement with anything else.
Hemingway was born near the close of the old century and was fated to become one of the great expressers of enduring disorder in this century. His sense of incongruity was everything to him and came out as an uncanny intuition of stress, of the danger point, of the intolerable pressure level in life, personal and political. Women have their bodily fears and men have theirs; both relate to the sexual organs, to sexual vulnerability and respect. Perhaps Hemingway himself did not know just where and how a famously rugged, fearless, sometimes madly aggressive sportsman developed that special fear of violation and of mutilation—it is hinted at in the encounter with a hobo in “The Battler”—that he was able to project back on the world with a burning intuition of the world’s inherent cruelty, danger, injustice. Sexual vulnerability is a universal condition that only a Hemingway could have concealed and yet mythologized in The Sun Also Rises and Death in the Afternoon. But in the mysteriously transforming interaction between Hemingway’s bruised psyche and his masculine need always to sound positive—something extraordinary did result. His self-disapproval at being vulnerable at all had to be hidden, but his shock at not being allowed always to have his own way made him see the world as inherently treacherous. His easy American claim to power—especially over his own life—was constantly being limited and denied. The self remained intact. But wary, very wary, it had premonitions of war after war. Hemingway was not just being cocky when he put down writers who had not seen battle. Phlegmatic types never suffered and understood as he did. (Gertrude Stein was so vain that, living under Nazi occupation in France, she felt mysteriously protected—and she was.) Responding bitterly to accusations that he was “indifferent,” Hemingway memorably responded in a letter, “These little punks who have never seen men street fighting, let alone a revolution … Listen—they never even heard of the events that produced the heat of rage, hatred, indignation, and disillusion that formed or forged what they call indifference.”
Society, the body politic, the “world” that makes continually for war and social disorder, works as fiercely on people’s unconscious and becomes their true intuitions. This often unhinges them without their recognizing the cause as politics or common fate.
Hemingway’s attraction to violence, to hunting and fishing, to war—he saw a lot of war but was never a soldier—was not just a form of hell-raising and self-testing in the usual masculine way. It was a way of coming close to certain ordeals fundamental to his generation. From the beginning, because of his upbringing as a young Christian gentleman in a suffocatingly proper suburb of Chicago—Oak Park, “where the saloons end and the churches begin”—violences fascinated him as clues to what he graphically called “in our time.” Like so many great modern writers, he was of solid bourgeois background and therefore knew that, morally, the bourgeois world was helpless.
Confronting danger everywhere, he made himself one with his time by running full tilt into everything that would bring a fresh emergency into his life. And everything certainly did. Gertrude Stein laughed in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that for a man so professionally virile and athletic, Hemingway was certainly fragile. John Dos Passos was to say in The Best Years that Hemingway was always having to go to bed to recuperate from his many injuries. When he did not seek damage, it sought him. From boyhood on he suffered accidents that were grotesque in their violence toward this body they did not kill. As a boy, he fell and had a stick driven into the back of his throat, gouging out part of both tonsils. In 1918, when he was a Red Cross worker in Italy distributing supplies to soldiers, a mortar shell exploded more than twenty fragments into his legs; he was then hit twice by machine-gun bullets while carrying a more seriously injured man to the rear. As a young writer in Paris during the twenties, he was clipped on the forehead by pieces of a skylight that fell just as he was standing under it. In Wyoming in 1930, his car turned over and his right arm was pinned back by the top of the windshield and badly fractured, the bone sticking through the muscle. At another time, his brother Leicester reports, Hemingway shot a shark with a rifle, but the bullets split into several small pieces of hot lead that ricocheted into the calves of both his legs. In 1949, while duck shooting in the marshes near Venice, he got a bit of shell wadding blown into his eye, and a serious infection developed; in 1953 he crash-landed in Africa, and the rescue plane that picked him up crashed and burned; when he reached medical aid at Nairobi (just in time to read his obituaries), his internal organs had been wrenched out of place, his spine was injured, and he was bleeding from every orifice.
It is absurd to separate Hemingway from his work. He pushed his life at the reader, made his fascination with death and danger the central theme in his many pages about bullfighting, sport, and war, brought the reader closer to his own fascination with violence and terror as a central political drama. His great gift was to locate repeated episodes of violence (so linked by some profound compulsion that we anticipated the shotgun suicide) in the Turks expelling the Greeks in the lacerating inter-chapters of In Our Time, in the horns perforating the bullfighter (so that all the internal organs were sliced through at once) in Death in the Afternoon, in the very impotence of Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises and Colonel Cantwell in Across the River and into the Trees.
One could go on, as Hemingway certainly did, from the early story “Indian Camp,” in which the Indian husband in the upper bunk cuts his throat as the doctor in the bunk below performs a cesarian on his wife with a jackknife and sews her up with nine-foot tapered gut leaders, to the ridiculously inflated episodes in the posthumous Islands in the Stream, where Hemingway talks of going after German submarines all by himself. The point is that Hemingway was a soul at war. He wins our assent, perhaps now more than ever, because it is the “outside” world that is increasingly violent today. Hemingway may have been as big a braggart and egotist as ever lived, but he had the stamp of the true artist. His emotions were prophetic, his antennae were out to the truth. He knew that destruction is a god over our lives, that the fear of death shapes us, that without any belief in immortality there can be no expectation of justice, so that the whole ghastly century is beginning to look like one unending chain of murder and retribution.
Hemingway’s greatest gift was to identify his own capacity for pain with the destructiveness at large in our time. The artist works by locating the world in himself. Hemingway did something more: he located in himself his century’s infatuation with technology, technique, instruments of every kind. Hemingway was recognized as an original, he fascinated and magnetized, because his theme was the greatest possible disturbance. His own sense of this was cold, proud know-how, professionally detached and above all concerned with applying a systematic, consistent method to everything he described. Obviously one attraction of sport, war, bullfighting was that each called for the maximum concentration of technique. Hemingway was clever and informed and quick to tell you what he knew. He always made a point of giving you in the midst of a story the exact name of a wine, the exact horsepower of a machine, even the exact moment in Paris—remember Lady Brett’s entrance in The Sun Also Rises—when a woman appeared in a tight sweater and skirt so that she looked like the sides of a yacht. “She started all that.”
Hemingway liked to write, as Nick Adams liked to make camp in “Big Two-Hearted River,” from technical detail to detail. He had grown up in a world where men still travelled by horse, took care of their horses, repaired things themselves, walked everywhere, often grew or shot their own food. He believed in the work of one’s own hands even to the point of usually writing by hand. It was this that led him to his great discovery of what painting could do for writers. Newspaper work for the Kansas City Star and the Toronto Star had taught him the first basic: to write professionally is to write to somebody else’s mind, and you have to lay out all the facts in an assured, flat, knowing manner without the slightest suggestion or indecision or demonstrative emotion about what you know. You have to “reach the reader,” said managing editors, to write for a newspaper so that said reader will distinguish Ernest M. Hemingway from a dozen other newswriters.
The paintings young Hemingway saw in France, most intimately at Gertrude Stein’s flat, 27 Rue de Fleurus, were spellbindingly the work of an artist’s own hand, of new theories of perception, of common physical materials. Nothing could have been more instantly pleasing to his imagination and his native sense of things. Painting was the decisive experience for an American abroad; “Europe” could seem one great painting. Painting stimulated a young reporter, already shrewdly aware of war and sport as the stuff of literature, to think of writing as a method. Painting was to do more for Hemingway than it was to do even for Stein, who in the end cared for painters more than for painting. “Genius” and “personality” were to become her topics. Stein could not draw at all and in fact had to leave Johns Hopkins medical school because of this and other failures in observation. Her famous Cézannes had been discovered and bought by her erratic brother Leo, her Matisses by Michael and Sally Stein. She kept the family collection when Leo became infuriated by cubism and stopped buying paintings. She depended on painting for the mental impressions that were her specialty. Unlike Hemingway, she had little feeling for the sensuous world. Her great interest was psychology, the “bottom truth” about anybody she met. Proceeding from psychology to composition, she became fascinated by what she felt to be the human mind as its own self-sufficient subject. “The human mind writes what it is.… The human mind consists only in writing down what is written and therefore it has no relation to human nature.”
Stein was a profoundly clever theoretician, a great aphorist and wit, and a true inventor of composition based on what she called “the continuous present.” Without seeing her paintings, without listening to the infatuated conversation about painting at 27 Rue de Fleurus, Hemingway might not have become Hemingway at all. As she was jealously to charge in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Hemingway was a sedulous ape, an all-too-adept pupil of other people’s ideas and methods. But her comparative indifference to the subject matter of painting and the way she took off from painting to emphasize for psychological purposes the authority of the eye gave Hemingway the advantage over her.
Stein was fascinated by the small particular difference that distinguished identically made objects, like her Ford car, from each other. Sentences were all sentences, but each sentence was itself. She believed that the single sentence is the key to writing, and she certainly practiced what she preached: “in composition one thing is as important as another thing.” As Kenneth Burke was to say, we have been sentenced to the sentence. It was sentences she heard from her family’s black retainers. As a very bright student in William James’s psychology courses, she was on the track of the individual, self-contained statement as disclosure. She was to see the sentence as orphic revelation: hers! So a sentence could become the glowing unit of a page, the building block of literature. But she was arrogant, she saw herself as a sibyl without fear or reproach, and writing through the night (in the morning Toklas would worshipfully pick up and type the scattered scrawled sheets) she heedlessly wrote straight from the ear to the paper. Her last books, like Hemingway’s last books, showed the expansion and disintegration of a style founded on conversation.
Stein’s genius was for conversation and especially for listening to other people’s conversation. What fascinated her in the “new” painting by Cézanne and Matisse was the fact that something, anything, could be done by a temperament sufficiently self-willed—the slashing lines and thickly encrusted colors, Matisse in particular with his use of color as line, the thick, joyously rhythmical color building up an impression totally sufficient to the design that would satisfy the eye. Every image is made up of minute particulars. Every particular is realized through the maximum concentration and toil. The world is built up from such particulars. As the cubists soon proved, an object is a form made up of inherent forms. We go from cube to cube, atom to atom, as nature did in the long creation of every living thing that makes up the whole.
Hemingway’s approach to painting was more diffident but actually closer to its sensuous content and to his own delight in method. The difference between Stein and Hemingway can be seen even in their handwriting. Her letters were tall, sprawling, arrogantly sloppy, with the large telltale spaces between words that were characteristic of her reflective mind. His letters were close, carefully and slowly shaped. They remind me of Nick Adams making camp in “Big Two-Hearted River,” another demonstration of Hemingway’s own planned, anxiously careful, tidy assemblage of words as objects.
He started a fire with some chunks of pine he got with the ax from a stump. Over the fire he stuck a wire grill, pushing the four legs down into the ground with his boot. Nick put the frying pan on the grill over the flames. He was hungrier. The beans and spaghetti warmed. Nick stirred them and mixed them together. They began to bubble, making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface. There was a good smell. Nick got out a bottle of tomato catchup and cut four slices of bread. The little bubbles were coming faster now. Nick sat down beside the fire and lifted the frying pan off.
Of course the great precedent to all this, Hemingway acknowledged, was Huckleberry Finn. The passage in which Nick Adams packs his captured trout between layers of fern reminds one of Huck planning to escape his father. He methodically lists the things he has, the things he has gained, the things he is sure of.
The old man made me go to the skiff and fetch the things he had got. There was a fifty-pound sack of corn meal and a side of bacon, ammunition, and a four-gallon jug of whiskey and an old book and two newspapers for wadding besides some tow. I toted up a load, and went back and sat down on the bow of the skiff to rest. I thought it all over and I reckoned I would walk off with the gun and some lines and take to the woods, when I run away. I guessed I wouldn’t stay in one place but just tramp right across the country, mostly nighttimes, and hunt and fish to keep alive and so get so far away that the old man nor the widow wouldn’t ever find me any more.
Hemingway was naturally drawn to painting in France because it celebrated homely natural materials—like the world he knew and wanted to write about. Although he had seen the pioneer collections of the Art Institute in Chicago, it was the double experience of writing English in France and of being daily stimulated by the streets, the bridges, the museums, by meeting Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, that helped to form this cunningly obedient listener into the powerfully undercutting stylist that he became. Stein said: “One of the things I have liked all these years is to be surrounded by people who know no English. It has left me more intensely alone with my eyes and my English.” That is what Hemingway felt; it is his marvellous representation of this vital early experience that makes his Paris in A Moveable Feast so beautiful, though the book is wicked in its attempt to destroy Stein, Ford, and Fitzgerald and a downright lie in its underhanded description of the collapse of his marriage to Hadley. He does not say that when he became famous he became insupportably arrogant. He was unknown, “poor and happy,” in A Moveable Feast, but he became ferocious in the days of fame. Fame inflamed him more than liquor and turned Stein’s obedient little “ape” into an inferno of unrelenting ego. It did not make him happy. Painting at least took him out of himself.
French painting did more for Hemingway than reinforce his American passion for technique, for method, for instruments, for utensils. It gave him, as it did a whole generation of foreign artists in Paris, a sense of what Baudelaire called luxe, calme et volupté. Marc Chagall, another foreigner in Paris, said: “These colors and these forms must show, in the end, our dreams of human happiness.” Hemingway lived a life of danger, near-catastrophe, and was inwardly ravaged by his attraction to danger and the boozy life he led in the company of sycophants all over the world; he became a victim of his own celebrity. He was attracted to the harmony in painting as he was influenced by the direction it gave his imagination.
One of the recurrent themes in his work is the rallying from discomfort to comfort, from danger to safety, from death to life, from ordeal to escape. He was as much a romantic about himself as he was a cold-eyed observer of the world at large. In fact, he was so savagely competitive and such a brutal antagonist to other people that the pastoral, harmonious, cuddly sensations he described were as vital to his existence as the seeking of danger. Painting, even the most violent-looking painting by those whom the French once called les fauves, wild beasts, usually subsides into a source of peace. You can look at a Cézanne in 1906 and walk away from it disturbed, but in 1926 you will not remember what once jarred you. When Leo Stein first went to the picture dealer Ambrose Vollard to look at the Cézannes that Bernard Berenson told him about, he had to turn them up, one after another, from a dusty pile. Leo and Gertrude Stein, usually Leo, had to talk night and day to their friends to make them see these paintings. When the great Stein collection was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the room seemed to blaze with sunlight.*
Painting far more than writing suggests the actual texture of human happiness. Hemingway understood that; what excited him, as a writer, about painting was a promise of relief from civilization, a touch of the promised land. The Hemingway hero is usually alone in nature, and the landscape he sees (and will bring back in words) is in minute particulars unseen by anyone but him. Again and again in his work this often cruel writer shows himself to be an unabashed American romantic positively melting in the presence of BEAUTY. The opening lines of A Farewell to Arms cast a spell. They do not altogether make sense except as pure visual impressionism, repeated and echoing Hemingway’s own effort to get these “impressions” down.
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
If Cézanne’s greatness lay in the removal of his subjects from the contingent world, this opening paragraph is an imitation of that removal. It is exclusively an impression from the outside, it rests within the eye of the beholder. As an impression it is static, for it calls attention to the beholder’s effort to capture one detail after another rather than to the scene of war. As so often happens in Hemingway’s prose forays into war, bullfighting, marlin fishing, hunting, there is an unnatural pause in the last sentence—“leaves stirred by the breeze”—a forced transition made necessary by “painting” the scene in words. We positively see the writer at his easel.
What Stein caught from painting—it was a literary idea—was the ability of the writer to call attention to each stroke. Hemingway said that writing is architecture, not interior decoration. When he turned from the obedient pupil into the world-famous Ernest Hemingway, he made a great point, in talking about his own writing through his contempt for other people’s writing, of saying that they were “unreadable.” Readable meant the reduction of the world to a line of glitteringly clear sentences. Ironically, Stein criticized his first writings as being inaccrochable, not hangable on a wall, not ready to be looked at. It was she, with her thousand-page soliloquies and meanderings, who turned out to be inaccrochable. She longed to have a great public, like Hemingway. When she and the GIs discovered each other in 1944, she would not let a single Brewsie or Willie go.
Hemingway had the magnetic gift of fame, of arousing attention with every word, that Stein bitterly missed. He had learned his lesson from her all too well. He had in fact learned to lasso the reader, to become his eyes and ears exactly as a Cézanne or a Matisse rivets attention, obliterates everything around it. This works better in Hemingway’s marvellous stories, which are consistent, all “composition,” every inch of the canvas filled, than in his novels. There he often stops the action to do some scene painting and is swaggeringly self-indulgent, both in self-portraiture and as a maker of beautiful effects.
A picture is an action that must fill up its available space. Stein was fascinated by the concentration that is behind all true painting. She was always telling Hemingway: “concentrate.” He certainly learned to concentrate. The inter-chapters of In Our Time, which tell of condemned men being carried to the gallows in a chair because they have lost control of their sphincter muscles and German soldiers climbing over a wall and being potted one two three—“We shot them just like that”—showed that Hemingway was concentrating all right, concentrating on the reader. Hemingway influenced a whole generation of journalists to become pseudoartists, especially around Time, where every little article was called a “story” and was rewritten and rewritten as if it were a paragraph by Flaubert instead of the usual Luceite’s overemphasized account of the personal characteristics of some big shot who had made the week’s cover.
Eventually, Hemingway’s influence began to influence him too much. The famous brushwork became bloated and sometimes suggested the relaxed intention that all good American writers seek after writing. But Hemingway at his best understood that a short story by its very compressiveness comes nearest a lyric poem or haiku in its total intactness. A novel is by tradition too discursive, epic, and widespread. Of all Hemingway’s novels, The Sun Also Rises has the best chance of surviving, for it is more consistent in its tone, its scene, and even Hemingway’s scorn than A Farewell to Arms, which veers between the sheerest personal romanticism and Hemingway’s desire to give an essentially lyric cast to his observations of the Italian-Austrian front in World War I.
More and more in his big books Hemingway, for all his genius at intuiting the trouble spots and danger points in human existence, used his well-developed style as a lyric diversion from his increasing sense of being closed in. The old rugged individualist had somehow known from the beginning that the coming century was going to be war on the individual. That was the dark and even ominous climate of feeling—achieved in the fewest, somehow punitive words—he got so unforgettably into his great stories, especially “Big Two-Hearted River.” This story sums up the Hemingway hero’s courage and despair, his furthest need and his deepest fear, in a way that also sums up the Western American’s virtually sexual encounter with Nature, his adoration and awe, his sense of being too small for it, his abrupt, unfulfilled confrontation with what once seemed the greatest gift to man, but somehow always threw him off.
Hemingway was always a deeply personal writer. The immediacy, sometimes the deliberate brutality, but above all his vulnerability to anxiety, rage, frustration, and despair, gave him a masterful closeness to his kaleidoscope of emotions. He was by turns so proud yet so often stricken a human creature that the reader again and again surrenders to him. For Hemingway makes you feel in painfully distinct human detail how much the world merely echoes the endless turmoil in the human heart.
Ahead the river narrowed and went into a swamp. The river became smooth and deep and the swamp looked solid with cedar trees, their trunks close together, their branches solid. It would not be possible to walk through a swamp like that. The branches grew so low.…
… He did not feel like going on into the swamp. He looked down the river. A big cedar slanted all the way across the stream. Beyond that the river went into the swamp.
Nick did not want to go in there now. He felt a reaction against deep wading with the water deepening up under his armpits, to hook big trout in places impossible to land them. In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it. He did not want to go down the stream any further today.
Hemingway was a painfully complex man who was indeed as gifted and, yes, as “brave” as he claimed to be. He did his work. He hauntingly intimated on paper some fundamental conflicts that like all of us he did not resolve in the flesh. Especially not in the flesh. Nor did he realize these conflicts in his novels as the great novelists have done. He was too immature and self-absorbed, in the fashion of so many gifted Americans maddened by the gap between their talent and their vulnerability. What made Hemingway important, what will keep his best work forever fresh, was his ability to express a certain feeling of hazard that men in particular do not suffer any less because they go out of their way to meet it. Who is to say how much this sense of hazard, peril, danger, with its constant rehearsal of the final and perhaps only real battle—with death as the embodiment of a universe that is not ours alone, that may not be ours at all—who is to say how much Hemingway sought it out for his natural subject matter as much as it constantly whipped him to prove himself again and again? In Gregory Hemingway’s memoir, he says that he felt
relief when they lowered my father’s body into the ground and I realized that he was really dead, that I couldn’t disappoint him, couldn’t hurt him anymore.…
I hope it’s peaceful, finally. But oh God, I knew there was no peace after death. If only it were different, because nobody every dreamed of, or longed for, or experienced less peace than he.
This is the truth about Hemingway that all the carousing and boasting could not conceal. Yet it is a truth that every reader recognizes with gratitude as being at the heart of the darkness that Hemingway unforgettably described: the sense of something irremediably wrong. Against this, Hemingway furiously put forth his dream of serenity, of Nature as the promised land, for which composition—the painter’s word that he picked up as his ideal—suggested the right order of words in their right places. As Ford Madox Ford put it so beautifully in his introduction to A Farewell to Arms, “Hemingway’s words strike you, each one, as if they were pebbles fetched fresh from a brook. They live and shine, each in its place. So one of his pages has the effect of a brook-bottom into which you look down through the floating water.”
Nature as a nonhuman ideal has always been an American’s romantic dream. All the great American landscape painters have always portrayed Mother Nature as too big for the solitary man on the cliff looking down. By contrast, as Malraux wrote in Man’s Fate, painting to Orientals has been the practice of “charity.” Charity is hardly what Hemingway found in the world or what he sought from painting. There is no charity in his writing at all, serenity on occasion, a rally, a promise of peace. He was a tough, sharp realist about other people, for in portraying himself so exhaustively, he portrayed us and the pitiless century into which we were born.
*In 1959 I saw at the Hermitage in Leningrad postimpressionist paintings bought by Russian merchants in Paris in the early 1000s. After fifty years, they were still being brought up from the cellars. Looking at them propped up against sofas, I thought of Bergotte in Proust’s La Prisonnière, seeing his first Vermeer and saying to himself, “That is how I ought to have written.”