September 10, 1950

The Author's Name Is Hemingway

By JOHN O'HARA

ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES By Ernest Hemingway.

he most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare, has brought out a new novel. The title of the novel is "Across the River and Into the Trees." The author, of course, is Ernest Hemingway, the most important, the outstanding author out of the millions of writers who have lived since 1616.

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Ill, U. S. A., on July 21, 1898. That makes him an American whose age is 52. His father was a physician named Clarence Edmonds Hemingway; his mother's maiden name was Grace Hall.

Hemingway went to Oak Park High and not to college. He got into the newspaper business, went to France as a Red Cross ambulance driver when he was 19 years old and a year later was badly shot up in Italy. After World War I he spent most of his time in Europe, with visits to the United States and Africa for hunting, fishing, and seeing friends and acquaintances.

He anticipated World War II, and took part in the actions in Spain. In 1944 he participated in the invasion of the European continent. (He was anti-Fascist in the Spanish hostilities and anti-Hitler in the subsequent activities. It may seem that these things should go without saying, but nowadays nothing goes without saying. These comments are meant to be straightforward, but there must be no lingering doubt.)

Between War One and War Two Ernest Hemingway produced the following books: "Three Stories and Ten Poems" (1923); "In Our Time" (1924); "The Torrents of Spring" (1926); "The Sun Also Rises" (1926); "Men Without Women" (1927); "A Farewell to Arms" (1929); Death in the Afternoon" (1932); "Winner Take Nothing" (1933); "The Green Hills of Africa" (1935); "To Have and Have Not" (1937); "The Fifth Column" (1938); "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940).

Books do not necessarily represent an author's activity, but the new novel is Hemingway's thirteenth book in what appears to be twenty-seven years of writing and knocking around, for a rough average of one book every two years. Hemingway has not been idle, and most of the items in his bibliography come alive by merely calling up their titles.

The reasons that Ernest Hemingway is important are not easy to search for, although they are easy to find. Once you have skipped the remarks of the pedants, the college professors, the litterateurs, and of Hemingway himself, and have examined his background and his still immediate history, you can relax down to the fine, simple, inexplicable acceptance of being in the world-presence of a genius. The college professors (No can do; can teach pretty good) are ready out of their chunky erudition to prove that Ernest Hemingway got that way because he had a sister whose middle name was Xerxes. Or they, the pundits, may have got by hearsay a remote rumor that one day in Montreal a man who looked very much like Ernest Hemingway was seen to have in the left hand pocket of his tweed jacket a small volume not too dissimilar from an Anabasis.

The chances are that Ernest Hemingway in the formative years didn't read much but Ring Lardner's sport stories in the Chicago papers, Caesar's Gallic Wars and the literature that any high school boy skips over. Over or through. He was a big kid with not very good eyesight, with enormous, ill-controlled strength of muscle, and apparently, an enviable admiration for an enviable father. Ernest went to the rehearsal war, and, after it, got some rude experience in cablese, a frustrating discipline that almost lost us all an artist. There was, it must be remembered, a phase during which Hemingway could have been found guilty of poetry of a sort.

Miss Gertrude Stein, who was as inevitable as the Albany night boat, did Hemingway no harm. She was living in Paris, France, and she was a good influence. I have a theory, which I have offered before, that all you need to know about the influence of Miss Stein on the young Ernest Hemingway is to pretend that you are, say, a Chinese who never has read English; you look at some pages of the "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," then look at the superb Caporetto retreat writing in "A Farewell to Arms." You will think they were written by the same person.

In the new novel (as in some earlier ones) the big block paragraph is not employed by the artist as it was in "A Farewell to Arms." I have not been able to find a paragraph longer than fourteen uninterrupted slugs of type. Whatever influence Gertrude Stein had on Hemingway has been accepted, studied, utilized and rejected. Ernest Hemingway is and really always was, his own man. We now can forget about Gertrude Stein. Thank you very much, and so long.

The outsize boy, the doctor's son, the brittle bones, the halting speech (completely different from that of Dr. Maugham), the defective eyesight--they all had and have their part in the mental and physical makeup of a great author. But who has not known a stammering, gangling gawk of a doctor's embarrassment who couldn't go past M in the alphabet? Ernest Hemingway, the sternly self-edited artist, had young people in the Nineteen Thirties marrying on no more than "We'll have a fine life." Why? Because Ernest Hemingway, the artist, had put just those words in his lines of type at just the right time.

The truculent, self-pitying hero of "Across the River and Into the Trees" is a busted one- star general called Col. Richard Cantwell. He seems to have traversed the same territory as the charming Lieutenant Henry of "A Farewell to Arms." It is impossible to believe that the lieutenant and the colonel are the same man, and therefore the autobiographical aspect must be ruled out one time or the other. The present reviewer, whose age is 45, is unwilling to concede that Enrico and Ricardo are the same infant with years piled on. In any event, Colonel Cantwell is in Venice to see his girl, a beautiful and quite incredible countess named Renata. The colonel is full of junk, against the bad heart condition he has, and the story is hardly more than a report of their last love-making, to the accompaniment of a threnody on and by the dying warrior. That great, great man and fine actor, Walter Huston, was in my mind all the time I read this book. Huston, singing "September Song," you know. But Hemingway, the inimitable, has written a 308-page novel out of a "September Song" situation, and not one syllable of what Hemingway has written can or will be missed by any literate person in the world.

Before you ever see the girl, the countess, you are taken through some duck-shooting that makes you want to let go at a boatman with both barrels. At the same time you somehow are rooting for a second duck. The colonel is understandably angry with the inefficient boatman; he also is rather swaggeringly proud of getting two ducks. I, myself, a rifle man, wanted to kill the colonel while he was in the barrel that you shot ducks from, but that certainly is nothing against Hemingway's writing. He probably meant it that way.

The novel opens with the colonel on his way to his ultimate rendezvous with the countess. Cantwell, the colonel, is pulling rank on the rather nice little T-5 who is driving the colonel's Cadillac. The little fellow is somebody named Jackson, from the state of Wyoming. My own personal experience with Wyoming characters has been that Jackson would have twirled the colonel out of the automobile and reported him dead. The colonel insists upon giving Jackson, a non-commissioned officer, a Michelin- Baedeker course in how to appreciate Venice, Italy. The course goes back quite a few years, several centuries, in fact. It not only had to do with the colonel's serving in the Italian Army in War One, but 'way, 'way before. Jackson, who seemed to the present reviewer to be one of those Wyoming skinny boys whose father might have been a pal of Senator Cary's, should have stopped the Cadillac and said, "Colonel, you got any prayers, you say them, because you bore me." Then, to be sure, we'd have had no novel. Or not the same novel.

After the patronizing travelog, the non-com and Colonel Cantwell get to Venice, and the colonel has the rendezvous with his girl, the countess. She is, on this reviewer's oath, practically all that a middle-aged man with a cardiac condition could ask for. Not yet 19 years old, a countess who need not worry about consequences, Renata (whose name sounds like lasso to me) is so much in love with the colonel that she takes his rudeness and gives him emeralds in return.

It is so easy to kid that aspect of Hemingway's writing and it is so foolish to do so. Go ahead and disbelieve in Catherine Barkley, as I disbelieve now in the Countess Renata, as I did too in Maria, of "For Whom the Bell Tolls." But the Hemingway heroines, as distinguished from the Sinclair Lewis ones, have a way of catching up with you after you have passed them by. You read them; you see them played by Helen Hayes, Elissa Landi, Ingrid Bergman; you put them away. And yet in later years you form your own non-theatrical picture of them out of what you remember of what Hemingway wrote, and what you have seen of living women. If Rita Hayworth or Ava Gardner should play Renata it will be easy to understand why either actress was cast, but it will probably only postpone a personal picture of the heroine of "Across the River and Into the Trees." There are not many real things about Renata; in fact, she has so few individual characteristics and attributes that after the inevitable movie has been made, it may be much easier to form your own idea--and almost entirely your own--of what Renata was intended to be.

It is not unfair or unjustifiable, this casting of the novel's characters. The novel was written as a serial for Cosmopolitan, whose demands and restrictions are I should say, almost precisely those of the movies. Now that the novel is available between boards, a great many touches that most likely were in Hemingway's working manuscript have been restored. They don't add much, they don't take much away. At the same time they do make a difference: they make the bound volume authentically Hemingway, and not Hemingway plus (or maybe minus is the word) the Cosmopolitan editors. And in any case the touches never would appear in the movies. They would not even appear in the most rudimentary "treatment" that might be submitted to the Johnston Office.

The reasons Hemingway is important are not easy to search for, but they are easy to find. They are hard to search for, because he is so competent and deceivingly simple and plain. It is not enough to say that simplicity itself is rare. People are always mailing authors their 9-year-old children's compositions as examples of beautiful simplicity. Simplicity is not rare. And fancy, complicated writing isn't rare either. Every author gets fancy writing in the form of letters and manuscripts from jailbirds, psychopaths and students.

But what Hemingway has--and Steinbeck has it too--is pre-paper discipline. It means, first of all, point of view. A great many non-writers have it without having to reveal it; but with an author it is not only revealing; it often is exposing. A possibly oversimplified definition of point of view would be "feeling and preference" and, in an author's case, the expression of an attitude. It is in the manner and method of the expression of the attitude that writers vary, and before that, the pre-paper discipline--the thinking, the self-editing-- gets its test.

An author may seem to lead a ruggedly simple life, but the fact that he is an author makes him not a simple individual. The personality therefore requires enormous discipline in putting the uncomplicated thinking down on paper. The ostensibly simple lives led by men like Hemingway and Steinbeck tell practically nothing about the personalities, although the writing is simple too. The ostensibly simple life led by William Faulkner tells nothing about him either, for the writing comes out plain but complicated, with so little change in the process between first thought and final printed page that Faulkner, while a genius, may not be an artist. It makes damn small difference to him or to me.

It shouldn't to Hemingway, although it may, because he permits himself practically no private life, or at any rate gets none. The most recent, and most disgusting, example of the intrusions into Hemingway's private life was made by a publication that report on Hemingway's drinking habits, somewhat in the manner of a gleeful parole officer. It also included some direct quotes, in tin-ear fashion, of what were passed off as Hemingway's speech, but sounded more like the dialogue written for the Indian chief in "Annie Get Your Gun."

The inability to write the way people talk is a common affliction among writers. But for Eustace Tilley to raise an eyeglass over anybody's drinking is one for the go-climb-a- lamppost department. The magazine had printed numerous little attacks on Hemingway by a semi-anonymous staffman who has gone to his heavenly reward, just as it printed attacks on Faulkner by a critic who has returned to his proper chore on the radio. With the long piece on Hemingway the magazine achieved a new low in something.

In the new novel, Hemingway, rather regrettably, has done nothing to protect himself against personal attack, or, more accurately, counter-attack. He has named some names, and made easily identifiable some others: Patton, Eisenhower, Montgomery, Ney, Custer, Truman, Dewey, as well as an author or two, a journalist or two, and probably a few non- celebrated individuals who will recognize themselves or think they do.

This does not sound like a roman ý clef, any more than it is an autobiography (Hemingway is still alive, and Dick Cantwell ends the book by dying), and that doesn't matter either way. What matters is that Ernest Hemingway has brought out a new book.

To use his own favorite metaphor, he may not be able to go the full distance, but he can still hurt you. Always dangerous. Always in there with that right cocked.

Real class.

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