Books: The Hero of the Code

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Among major modern U.S. writers, Hemingway showed more internal discipline than Faulkner, who has ruined half his books with careless rhetorical obscurity, and more personal integrity than Fitzgerald, who potboiled and drank away the greatest natural gifts of the three as a novelist. Unlike Faulkner and Fitzgerald, Hemingway rarely dealt with the American scene after his early Nick Adams stories of hunting and fishing in the West. Internationally, Hemingway belonged with Eliot, Yeats and Joyce as one of the prime shapers of modern literature, but temperamentally he was more akin to that roving intellectual foreign legion of Malraux, Camus and Koestler, who sent back communiques from all the battlefronts of the 2Oth century consciousness and conscience.

The Good Place. Will Hemingway pass the test of timelessness? There are several good reasons for thinking so. Most of his short stories, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and The Sea have the internal inevitability of masterworks; no one can imagine them happening in some other way. The underlying theme is universal: natural man pitted against the mystery of the universe.

T. S. Eliot once proposed a test for the lasting significance of a writer: "Someone said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know." Through his books, Hemingway is "that which we know" of World War I, the Lost Generation, the mystique of the bullfight, the Spanish Civil War. One can learn all of this without knowing Hemingway, but once having read him, one can never see these subjects again without some angle or tint of his vision. His best books exist at that rare level at which literature becomes experience.

In Hemingway, experience is always a form of fate. It tells of defeat and "the evil-smelling emptiness" of death. It stirs memories of pleasure and desire, "of sunshine and salt water, of food, wine, and making love." Wherever he went, whatever he did, the fate Hemingway yearned for was deceptively simple and impossibly serene—it was "the good place" Nick Adams found on The Big Two-Hearted River: "He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him. Now it was done. He was very tired. He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in the good place."