LEADERS IN PROFILE Hemingway Legend Far From Truth

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28155, 19 December 1956, Page 18

LEADERS IN PROFILE Hemingway Legend Far From Truth

(By LES ARMOUR)

Ernest Hemingway is only 58, but he is already legendary and the photographers contrive to show him as a legend—old and grizzled, and a little tired.

In his own country he is known as “Poppa” and regarded affectionately because it is widely believed that the fires inside him have died out. His countrymen are relieved at the thought that they will no longer have to face his sometimes shocking language or harrowing descriptions of men torn to pieces by war. They think he will no longer tell them how rotten civilisation is.

In part, they think this because Hemingway took to writing about dissolute colonels obsessed by their dissolution and about old and foreign men in somebody else’s sea. In part, too. they think this because this is what the glossy magazines tell them and because Hemingway has retired to bask in the Cuban sun.

They are. almost certainly, wrong. Hemingway can still shoot a cigarette out of a man’s mouth from a fair distance. He did not go big game hunting in Africa last year because the rains did not come, the grass was brown, and he did not want to see it. But he will go back. He does not look in real life as old as the photographers have portrayed him. They have capitalised on the bushy beard gone grey, on the lines of his face which catch the shadows. The “Masterpiece” Furthermore. Hemingway is writing a book, a big book. He thinks it might be the “Masterpiece.” It is possible that the compassion which began to creep into his paragraphs with “Farewell to Arms.” spread wildly in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” and finally cast out everything else in “The Old Man of the Sea” will still be there in the new book. Experience has softened the man. but he is still willing to light a fire under the pompous, the and the cruel. It is possible, of course, that the man has not changed as fast as the world. Cook County, Illinois, was a very different place when Hemingway was born there in 1898. Chicago still had some of the air of a frontier town. The West still spread out before it, empty, vast and tempting. The men who lived in the Middle West and. even more, the men who lived in the West, were simple and blunt and their world was simple and blunt, too. Part of Hemingway’s drive was born of the jolt that came to him with the First World War when he plunged into a war he did not understand and got blown up serving a country (Italy) he did not understand by shellfire from an army (the Austrian) which he was fighting for a reason which eluded him.

It was like plunging into a nightmare from which he could not emerge. It was that experience which produced “Farewell to Arms’’—perhaps the best indictment of war in the language. His wonder turned to disillusion amid the “lost generation” of Americans who gathered in Paris after the war. It was a professional disillusion since they had gone to Paris to develoo their disillusion.

Hemingway sickened of them even as they had sickened of modern

civilisation and headed out into the wilderness of the world in order that he might find reality again. He found beauty .in Africa and recorded it. He found again some of the sense of wonder that he had lost and some of the vanishing American feeling for the glory of man’s struggle against nature. He recorded those, too.

He developed a passion for bul] fighting and “Death in the Afternoon passed into the language. It passe into the language as a satirical phrasi however; for Hemingway had ovei done it. The drama of "man agains bull is as artificial a thing as th blasphemous disillusion of America intellectuals gathered in Paris t disown their heritage.’ Spanish Civil War It was in the Spanish Civil War ths Hemingway found what he was, reall looking for: men with a purpose striving desperately to be genuinel

human. Even that turned sour when the Communists took over the war for their own ends and turned it into a hollow mockery. Before that, though, it had produced “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

Hemingway certainly saw himself as the young American professor—the hero who dies, not for some abstract cause, but simply because it is the inevitable outcome of his struggle to become a whole man. Hemingway would not, in the end. have cared much who won the war. He cared only about the individuals in it who found or lost themselves in the process.

Part of his strength has come from the fact that in his great books he has always been his own hero. He was the young soldier who made his peace in “Farewell to Arms.” He is also the hero of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The two heroes are imcompatible in print but, in life, they represent only two facets of one personality. When he has strayed from drawing himself, he has usually failed. “Over

the River and Into the Trees” has as its hero a dissolute colonel, diseased, decaying, utterly broken. Hemingway was never that and the hero became a caricature which served to make a political point. Unfortunately, politics has never been Hemingway’s strong point. The Book became fodder for the satirists.

Hemingway could have been the hero of “Old Man and the Sea.” The book faltered only in that the range and delicacy of the old man’s feelings were more consistent with the range and delicacy of a Hemingway than with the probable range, of a simple Cuban fisherman.

The book won him a Pulitzer Prize, an event which shocked Hemingway as much as it pleased him. He had never experienced respectability and he was not very sure that he wanted to. Thereafter, he had himself photographed surrounded by innumerable bottles lest the public should think he might have gone too far. Actually, he drinks little (one or two before dinner) and he works hard. He is always up by 6.30 a.m. and busy writing by 8 o’clock. He allows himself regular rests which sometimes last as much as a month or two but, unless he is driven from work by the visits of his innumerable friends, he keens up a steady pace. Much of his time is spent in revision and much of his writing is destined for his waste-paper basket. But sloth has no place in his make-up. He is far too much of an American to be convinced that there can be virtue without hard work. Nor is he, as legend would have it, a simple devotee of the four-letter word and the hairy-chested he-man school of art. He reads voraciously, ranks as an expert on painting, and possesses the passionate love of learning and devotion to truth which marks the true scholar. Beyond that his curiosity ranges far. Stacks of newspapers and periodicals are delivered every week to his Cuban house—everything from the “New Statesman and Nation” to the “Tatler.” His house overflows with books.

No-one knows how many of these he reads, but he is invariably as well versed on the latest murder trials as on the latest twist in abstractionist painting, as knowledgeable about the wars of the Romans as about the revolution in Spain.

That being so, about the only sure thing that can be predicted of his new novel is that, if it really is the masterpiece, the hero will be Ernest