In The Fifth Column, the hero, who has become finally indistinguishable from the false or publicity Hemingway, has here dosed himself with whiskey; a seductive and desirous woman, for whom he has the most admirable reasons for not taking any responsibility; sacred rage; the excitement of bombardment; and indulgence in that headiest of sports, for which he has now the same excellent reasons — the bagging of human beings.
You may be afraid, after reading The Fifth Column, that Hemingway will never sober up; but as you go on in the new volume in which it appears, which includes also his most recent short stories, you find that your apprehensions were unfounded. Three of these stories have a great deal more body — they are longer and more complex — than the comparatively meagre anecdotes collected in Winner Take Nothing.
And here are his real artistic successes with the material of his experiences in Africa, which make up for the miscarried Green Hills: ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro,’ which disengage, by dramatizing them objectively, the themes which in the carlier book never really got themselves presented.
And here is at least a beginning of a real artistic utilization of Hemingway’s experience in Spain: a little incident in two pages which outweighs the whole of The Fifth Column and all his Spanish dispatches, about an old man, ‘without politics,’ who has occupied his life in taking care of eight pigeons, two goats, and a cat, and who has been dislodged and separated from his pets by the advance of the Fascist armies — a story which takes its place in the category of the war series of Callot and Goya, whose union of elegance with sharpness Hemingway has already recalled in his earlier battle plates, a story which might have been written about almost any war. And here — what is very remarkable — is a story, ‘The Capital of the World,’ which finds an objective symbol for, precisely, what is wrong with The Fifth Column.
A young boy who has come up from the country and waits on tables in a pension in Madrid gets accidentally stabbed with a meat knife while playing at bullfighting with the dishwasher. This is the simple anecdote, but Hemingway has built in behind it all the life of the pension and the city: the priesthood, the working-class movement, the grownup bullfighters who have broken down or missed out. ‘The boy Paco,’ Hemingway concludes, ‘had never known about any of this nor about what all these people would be doing on the next day and on other days to come. He had no idea how they really lived nor how they ended. He did not realize they ended. He died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions.
He had not had time in his life to lose any of them, or even, at the end, to complete an act of contrition. ‘ So he registers in this very fine story the discrepancy between the fantasies of boyhood and the realities of the grown-up world. The artist in Hemingway, who feels things truly and cannot help recording what he feels, has actually said good-bye to these fantasies at a time when the war correspondent is making himself ridiculous by attempting still to hang on to them. The emotion which principally comes through in ‘Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ — as it figures also in The Fifth Column — is a growing antagonism to women. Looking back, one can see at this point that the tendency has been there all along.
In ‘The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,’ the boy Nick goes out squirrel hunting with his father instead of obeying the summons of his mother; in ‘Cross Country Snow,’ he regretfully says farewell to male companionship on a skiing expedition in Switzerland, when he is obliged to go back to the States so that his wife can have her baby. The young man in ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ compels his girl to have an abortion against her will; another story, ‘A Canary for One,’ bites almost unbearably but exquisitely on the loneliness to be endured by a wife after she and her husband shall have separated; the peasant of ‘An Alpine Idyll’ abuses the corpse of his wife (thcsc last three under the general title Men Without Women).
Brett in The Sun Also Rises is an exclusively destructive force: she might be a better woman, it is intimated, in the company of Jake, the American; but actually he is protected against her and is in a sense revenging his own sex through being unable to do anything for her sexually. Even the hero of A Farewell to Arms kills Catherine — after enjoying her abject devotion — by giving her a baby, itself born dead. The only women with whom Nick Adams’s relations are perfectly satisfactory are the little Indian girls of his boyhood who are in a position of hopeless social disadvantage and have no power over the behavior of the white males — so that he can get rid of them the moment he has done with them. Thus in The Fifth Column Mr.
Philip brutally breaks off with Dorothy — he has been rescued from her demoralizing influence by his dedication to Communism, just as the hero of The Sun Also Rises was saved by his physical disability — to revert to a little Moorish whore. Even Harry Morgan, who is represented as satisfying his wife on the scale of a Paul Bunyan, deserts her in the end by dying and leaves her racked by the cruelest desire. And now this instinct to get the women down presents itself frankly as a fear that the women will get the men down. The men in both these African stories are married to American harpies of the most soul-destroying sort. The hero of ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ loses his soul and dies of futility on a hunting expedition in Africa, out of which he is not getting what he had hoped.
The story is not quite stripped clean of the trashy moral attitudes which have been coming to disfigure the author’s work: the hero, a seriously-intentioned and apparently promising writer, goes on a little sloppily over the dear early days in Paris when he was earnest, happy, and poor, and blames a little hysterically the rich woman whom he has married and who has debased him. Yet it is one of Hemingway’s remarkable stories. There is a wonderful piece of writing at the end when the reader is made to realize that what has seemed to be an escape by plane with the sick man looking down on Africa is only the dream of a dying man. The other story, ‘Francis Macomber,’ perfectly realizes its purpose. Here the male saves his soul at the last minute, and then is actually shot down by his woman, who does not want him to have a soul.
Here Hemingway has at last got what Thurber calls the war between the sexes right out into the open and has written a terrific fable of the impossible civilized woman who despises the civilized man for his failure in initiative and nerve and then jealously tries to break him down as soon as he begins to exhibit any. Going back over Hemingway’s books today, we can see clearly what an error of the politicos it was to accuse him of an indifference to society. His whole work is a criticism of society: he has responded to every pressure of the moral atmosphere of the time, as it is felt at the roots of human relations, with a sensitiveness almost unrivaled. Even his preoccupation with licking the gang in the next block and being known as the best basketball player in high school has its meaning in the present epoch. After all, whatever is done in the world, political as well as athletic, depends on personal courage and strength.
With Hemingway, courage and strength are always thought of in physical terms, so that he tends to give the impression that the bullfighter who can take it and dish it out is more of a man than any other kind of man, and that the sole duty of the revolutionary socialist is to get the counterrevolutionary gang before they get him. But ideas, however correct, will never prevail by themselves: there must be people who are prepared to stand or fall with them, and the ability to act on principle is still subject to the same competitive laws which work in sporting contests and sexual relations. Hemingway has expressed with genius the terrors of the modern man at the danger of losing control of his world, and he has also, within his scope, provided his own kind of antidote. This antidote, paradoxically, is almost entirely moral.
Despite his preoccupation with physical contests, his heroes are almost always defeated physically, nervously, practically: their victories are moral ones. He himself, when he trained himself stubbornly in his unconventional, unmarketable art in a Paris which had other fashions, gave the prime example of such a victory; and if he has sometimes, under the menace of the general panic, seemed on the point of going to pieces as an artist, he has always pulled himself together the next moment. The principle of the Bourdon gauge, which is used to measure the pressure of liquids, is that a tube which has been curved into a coil will tend to straighten out in proportion as the liquid inside it is subjected to an increasing pressure.