HEMINGWAY
Kenneth Lynn
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987
784 pp., $24.95
Despite having lived his life in the glare of publicity, Ernest Hemingway kept secret the most significant experiences that fed his art. As a result, ordinary readers and critics alike, convinced that they understood him, have missed the deepest meanings of his works. The popular view has always been of Hemingway as a celebrant of male prowess: on the battlefield in the First World War, in the Spanish Civil War and World War II, in the bull ring and boxing rings, hunting big game in Africa, taking big fish off Cuba, and in dominating and using women. A somewhat more sophisticated but equally untenable view has it that the heroism and brutality of Hemingway and his characters were poses struck by a man uncertain of his masculinity. Finally, there was the interpretation that came to dominate first literary criticism and then the academy, as Hemingway's writing gradually came to be included in high school and college reading lists. By this account, after Hemingway was wounded in the First World War, he never recovered from an accompanying psychic wound; he carried with him also a disillusionment with idealism and rhetorical excess of the kind that seemed to have lured the world's leaders into that war in the first place.
The Hemingway hero, critics of this persuasion point out, was not actually a brave man of action. Instead, like Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises (1926), Hemingway's first novel, the hero is a sensitive man who looks to such characters as the intrepid young bullfighter Pedro Romero for models of bravery applicable to his own dilemma. Jake Barnes, who apparently suffers from sexual impotence as the result of an unnamed wound received in the war, is said to represent Hemingway himself, who is to be understood as the opposite of the swashbuckling figure of his legend. By way of the critic Malcom Cowley in the 1930s, and the academic Philip Young in the 1950s, this last account of Hemingway made its way into the standard biography by Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969). It was a view that rested in large part on the exaggerated versions of his war wounds peddled by the young Hemingway himself.
The psychic-wound, sensitive-hero theory may have reigned in the academy, but it never dispelled the popular myth. That myth was expressed as late as 1954 in the Swedish Academy's citation of Hemingway for the Nobel Prize. It recognized his "powerful, style-making mastery of the art of modern narration," but mistakenly characterized his work as "brutal, cynical, and callous." In the meantime, the literary constituency for the psychic-wound theory was encouraged by Hemingway's misleading endorsement of the related notion that disillusionment as a result of the war was a key to his work. (Since the supposed psychic wound was unconscious, he could not be expected to acknowledge that, and so the case was regarded as complete.)
None of the standard interpretations satisfied Kenneth Lynn, a literary critic, biographer, and historian known for his ability to ferret out the cultural imperative behind literary evaluations. In an article in Commentary in 1981, he examined Hemingway's early stories supposed to best demonstrate the importance of his war wound and found in them something entirely different: The Hemingway protagonist's dark suffering had a decidedly familial origin.
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