Hemingway and the Common and Uncommon Reader

Confronting this formidable selection of some twenty-six essays from the last ten years of Hemingway studies, I am alternately confounded, irritated, amused, enlightened, and nudged into a reluctant evaluation of my own capacities as a reader. Each of these pieces is written with intelligence and a surety of purpose that I can only admire—even when I find some of the discussion beyond my understanding, some that I think to be seriously irrelevant, and some that seems to me tendentiously wrongheaded.

But first some necessary background on where—as the younger generation says—“I’m coming from.” In 1963 I published a book on Hemingway which, I blush to say, became for some ten or so years a prime source of plagiarism for high-school students writing papers on Hemingway’s fiction. Like most of my generation I had only a smattering of training in literary criticism—and that mostly picked up by osmosis. We were steeped in explication de texte (essentially the New Criticism), with some limited experience with historical (Marxist) and biographical/psychological (Freudian) criticism. In 1962, when I was writing my book, Hemingway’s suicide had occurred the year before; and the secondary material was sufficiently scant that I was able to read pretty much everything significant that then existed (Philip Young, Carlos Baker, Malcolm Cowley, and Robert Penn Warren being prime influences on my thinking). More important, as I recall, my initial engagement with Hemingway’s fiction was unmediated. I had read his stories as they appeared, outside of any academic setting, as I suppose people read Stephen King now. In fact I don’t think there was a single assigned Hemingway text in any course I took as a high-school, or undergraduate, or graduate student—although my doctoral mentor, Edward Wagenknecht, had attended Oak Park High School with Hemingway.

If I possessed a literary-critical credo at that time—and I’m not sure I did—it may have been a combination of Archibald MacLeish’s injunction that “a poem must not mean / but be” and Emerson’s cavalier advice that “it is the good reader that maketh the good book.” On a broader level I was much taken by Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces, and R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam. My simplistic approach to literature was to try to find how or if a poem, an essay, a novel, or a short story hangs together—how its disparate parts assemble themselves into a whole, a form, a vital integrated unit that may give the reader a sense of inevitability and emotional satisfaction. To this end my focus was on the emergence of recurrent themes, images, structural and stylistic patterns, etc. that might help me find a unity in the individual work and, beyond that perhaps, in the total oeuvre of the writer. Convinced, as well, of what is now called “American exceptionalism,” I was also eager to see how Hemingway’s work aligned itself with the American cultural pattern.

Thus I began my work on Hemingway, aware of his larger-than-life persona, knowing of his immense influence on the literary scene, and having the vague belief that he was an entertaining writer of “action” stories in what was then regarded as “hard-boiled realism” à la Raymond Chandler and James Cain. When I concluded my study, my respect for Hemingway’s achievement had soared markedly, and I saw him as a romantic—a writer whose heroism resided not in his undisputed macho bravado, but in his continuing desperate struggle to use his talent and strenuous aesthetic discipline to make himself whole. And I thought—and still think—that a half-dozen of his stories and several novels are superlative accomplishments and that “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” is as perfect a story as I know. At that time the posthumous material was unavailable and, consequently, in 1986 Twayne Publishers asked me to revise and update my edition. This I would...