A Quarter-Century Later,

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Hemingway should be spared further Freudian autopsy. He was a masterpiece of contradiction. Every element in him had a blood feud with its opposite. He cherished his friends and he treacherously turned on them (on Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald and many others). He adored women and he hated them. His literary program was to write the brutal truth, and yet he was sometimes a liar and a fraud. He was profoundly creative and profoundly destructive. He had a spontaneous gift of life. He enjoyed (that is the word) a lifelong relationship with death. He resolved all contradictions at last by joining his father and his father's pistol in the amniotic deep.