Ernest Hemingway.

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AMAZED at the place that Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) has achieved in American letters. To be sure, he was a celebrity and I have no argument or quarrel with those who have made him so. I simply believe that he is not a novelist who deserves the adulation that he has received from the American public. Hemingway is very much like the musician who knows only one note or tune and who plays it over and over again, and as a result enters the pantheon of artists.

More than anyone else, perhaps, Ernest Hemingway was the most famous representative of the so-called "lost generation," that group of young writers who contributed to one of the greatest outpourings of modern literature in our history. For the most part, they were young men who were either directly or indirectly involved in World War I and who belonged to a young generation that went to fight in that war, having been brought up on a very romantic and idealistic diet of Jeffersonianism and American Transcendentalism. Yet, they emerged from the experience of the war disillusioned and bitter. This disillusionment served more than anything else as a stimulus for a remarkably impressive literary production and a philosophical stance on life represented in that literature.

"The American Dream" is an expression that has been used to describe America and its promise to the individual, in which we can detect the thrust of three very essential influences: the Puritan "wealth-goodness concept," Jeffersonian democracy, and the Transcendentalist idea of the dignity of man. In The Great Gatsby (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald addresses the "wealth-goodness concept" and its effect on American life, clearly subordinating any notion of a positive correlation between the possession of wealth and the possession of character and goodness. Clearly, for him, rich people were not and are not the "best" people. Hemingway, in his work, rejects the Transcendentalist notion that man is free to do what he wishes, that human beings create their own destinies, that nothing is preordained, and that man is in complete control of his own life. Fate, according to the Transcendentalists, is an expression of nature; nature was one with God and God was higher than man. Hence, fate was no threat to man. Hemingway's theme is a rejection of this principle.

Hemingway's essential message is that man is a helpless victim of a malevolent environment, an environment which inflicts violence and pain. He believed that life wounds all of us unreasonably; it wounds each of us in a way that is most hurtful. If we love something then we will lose it because life will rob us of it. John Aldridge, the well-known American critic on literature, suggests that Hemingway's characters behave according to a "code" which is necessary if one is to survive as a human being in a threatening world. It is the code of the hero who suffers from an "unreasonable wound," and who is inwardly tough and outwardly reticent, and who must be able to live by self-restraint and perhaps even by self-hypnosis. One must show no emotions and form no emotional attachments. One must face life realistically without resorting to abstractions or to complex thought. This stance, this code of conduct, is clearly defensive. Hemingway has turned it into a kind of religion that insures safe-conduct through life.

He believes that emotions will "tip off" those who are out to "get us." If we show emotions and find ourselves, for example, openly expressing love for someone, then that person will in time be taken away from us. We have, you see, tipped our hand by showing our emotions. If we become directly or intimately involved with someone else or with some cause, then that person or that cause will be destroyed. We have shown a weak spot by our involvement.

In Hemingway's code, love is dangerous and therefore inadmissible since to love is to render oneself vulnerable to fate. When you love, you lose, and this law lies beyond the will of man. We cannot affect it, although we would like sometimes to think that we can. In A Farewell to Arms (1929), Frederick Henry is living a relatively safe life as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I. He is uncommitted and has no genuine commitment to the war or to a cause. Things go well for him until he falls in love with a nurse and after that all hell breaks loose. Catherine Barkley, the nurse, is taken away from him and from then on his life is chaotic. He is ruined. Toward the end of A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry, the protagonist awaiting the agonizing death of Catherine, says in a monologue: "They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you." It seems to me that this is Hemingway's basic theme--the danger of commitment to anyone or to any cause, even to life itself. As a refutation of commitment, it exposes young people to a moral and ethical relativism insofar as it completely denies that human beings have any responsibility to anything or to anyone other than to themselves.

In other words, Hemingway is saying that in order to be invulnerable, life must be performed as a ritual, and the ritual of the bullfight is Hemingway's emblem of man's appropriate role in life. In fact, the bullfight became an obsession for Hemingway, with the matador acting as the representative of the individual in Hemingway's lexicon. The matador faces the full, the extreme danger, without showing fear and almost with an indifference as to whether or not he survives. This is not because he does not care to survive, for he cares a great deal, though he is showing or attempting to show through his indifference that he does not care. In so doing he protects himself from a cruel fate that he knows is "out to get him" but will leave him alone for a while because "it" does not know that he really wants to live.

Life for Hemingway is unreasonable and its wound is unreasonable. In some ways, one could say that the disinterested factor in Hemingway's code ("grace under pressure") is the first expression of "cool." Hemingway was a frightened man and "cool" people are frightened people. Be "cool," show no emotion, and live by ritual. I submit that this approach is the legacy that Hemingway has left to society. In The Sun Also Rises (1926), we see that, while Jake Barnes lives a controlled life, things run rather smoothly, but when he becomes emotionally involved, life becomes unbearably painful. In short, in this novel, Hemingway's characters are playing it "cool." Some literary critics claim that Hemingway's treatment of Robert Cohn is anti-Semitic, but I would submit that it is not anti-Semitism that causes the figures in the novel to turn against Robert. Rather it is the fact that he is a relatively normal person capable of showing love and anger and resentment. Since he is not the least bit "cool," then, he is conceivably a threat to the other characters.

Hemingway has achieved one artistic goal, and that is because he has devised a style of writing which perfectly carries out his theme. In it, for example, there are no, or at most a very few, introductory adverbial clauses since an introductory adverbial clause implies a cause and effect principle in life. For instance, Hemingway would not write the sentence, "It began to rain and I got dry." He would be much more apt to say, "When it began to rain, I got dry." In essence, what Hemingway is saying is that there is no rhyme nor reason to life and that "they" threaten us all the time and offer us no warning but kill us gratuitously. To read the first chapter of A Farewell to Arms is to come into contact with typical Hemingway prose. It is made up of a series of coordinate clauses, representing, in my opinion, life which lurches at us, camouflaging the one clause that will eventually kill us. This chapter ends with a typical Hemingway understatement: "At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army." Only seven thousand! That is a true understatement and is typical of Hemingway's belief that the only way to survive in a violent world is to pretend that one does not care; indeed, minimizing seven thousand deaths is a very good way of minimizing one's concern for life.

And so I would say that Ernest Hemingway, aside from the fact that he was able to create a singular style that expressed his credo and theme, had only one tune to play. It is the theme of non-commitment and uninvolvement. This is a nihilistic idea and does not in the end qualify him for the honor of literary genius that has been assigned to him by American critics.

Stephen Crane, in The Red Badge of Courage (1895), a novel written only a few years before The Sun Also Rises, pictures nature as being indifferent toward man and this is frightening enough. Hemingway, however, goes one step further and pictures life as being actually "out to get us" while we remain helpless in the face of a pitiless fate. In order to ratify his view of life, his people must show no emotion or involvement in anything. We can express no allegiance to any cause, for if we let our guard down we will fall into an emotional trap that life has prepared for us, and ultimately we will suffer greatly. The humanistic idea that man has dignity or that he is able to control his environment or his future destiny is refuted over and over again by that famous "cool" member of the "lost generation," Ernest Hemingway himself.

JOHN A. PIDGEON is Head Master Emeritus of the Kiski School in Saltsburg, Pennsylvania.