Algren at Sea (58 page)

When the city clerk of Terre Haute refused to issue warrants for arrest of streetwalkers despite his sworn legal duty to issue warrants for arrest of streetwalkers, and instead demanded of the Terre Haute police, “Why don't you make war on people in high life instead of upon these penniless girls?” that little sport performed an act of literature.

For he was sustaining the great beginning Whitman had made when he wrote “there shall be no difference between them and the rest.” A beginning marked by an exuberant good humor; that yet sought darkly for understanding of America.

And sought through New York's Bowery and down Main Street of Winesburg to the edge of town; where the last gaslamp makes all America look hired.

A search past 4 A.M. gas stations upon nights when cats freeze to death on fire escapes and chimneys race the moon; down streets that Sister Carrie knew.

Beyond the grandfathers' walls there began to flow a bloodcolored current of vindictive life; that was fed into America's heart by violators of the grandfathers' dreams.

These were impractical men who lived upon a street for whom nobody prayed; where the cries of the sick, the tortured and the maimed had gone unheard.

They were the accused with whom Whitman had taken his stand when he wrote “I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself.” Guilty or not guilty, Whitman pled the defense.

As Stephen Crane had taken his place beside Maggie; as had Dreiser beside Clyde Griffiths. As had O'Neill beside Anna Christiansen; as had Richard Wright beside Bigger Thomas. As had Tennessee Williams beside Blanche DuBois. And where James Baldwin made his still-unanswered challenge: “If you don't know my name you don't know your own.”

What these writers shared was the perception that the owners of their society had not only lost touch with one another, but with their own true selves. The youth who had early armored himself against love became the man who found greater gratification in property than in love; the girl who began by evading the touch of the propertyless man became the woman demanding that Robin Hood be banned from the local library. For the prophets and preachers of this midland bourgeoisie damned the basic act of love as piggishness; while dignifying acquisitiveness, if succeeding on a scale sufficiently grand, as virtuous. Thus marriage consummated more for increase of property than for physical gratification seemed, to this strata, to be morally higher.

“When one is peacefully at home,” Chekhov had seen what all these impractical men had also seen, “life seems ordinary. But when one goes into the street and questions women life becomes terrible.”

It wasn't Tarkington but another Hoosier who heard, below the roar of ballpark crowds with a doubleheader sun striped across them, cries for help from beneath the stands. Ring Lardner left the park laughing strangely to himself. And later sat drinking alone.

Lardner's women come out of that same suburb of hell wherein Eliot's women waited in parlors for husbands with headpieces made of straw.
Indeed those splenetic vixens, whom W. C. Fields feared perpetually to confront, occupy the kitchen of the same house. Lardner's marvelous mimicry barely concealed his dread.

Though all his marriages are desperate, and all his Women prepare to cry to have their own way, their tears are never from disappointment of the flesh. Lardner's woman weeps because another woman's husband is succeeding faster than her own; because a daughter married beneath her, or because her son failed to make a certain fraternity.

The desolation of her view is reflected by that of Lardner's aging husband looking out the window of a Miami-bound Pullman:

“First we'd see a few pine trees with fuzz on 'em and then a couple acres of yellow mud. Then there'd be more pine trees 'n more fuzz and more yellow mud. And after a while we'd come to some pine trees with fuzz on 'em and then, if we watched close, we'd see some yellow mud.”

The God of the Middle Border had avenged Himself. He had let the Righteous Survivors sleep untroubled only to waken to a nightmare: the wills by which men and women had been divided from their true selves now divided them from conscience. The men they named to speak for them were men whose morality was no more than a projection of consciencelessness in the name of a whole class. Saith the pandowdy Jehovah: “If you're well-to-do you don't need a soul.”

The heart had been made fat and the ears heavy. They heard but understood not. They saw yet perceived not.

Nada
was a sea of yellow mud seen through a Pullman window.

Ring Lardner discerned the myths. He heard the cries. But he didn't know what to do about the lies. In a mock-biography he reported himself as a radio enthusiast who had designed his own set:

“At first he was unable to get any station at all and this condition held good to the day of his death. But he was always trying to tune in on Glens Falls, New York. It was not until his last illness that he learned there was no broadcasting station in that place.”

There was no broadcasting station in America. Lardner ended with nothing to tune in on. Hemingway's own set did not begin to work until he was in Paris.

 

Out of the scattered letters of that field, Hemingway wrote his own letter to the world.

He wrote to the woman whose life, she had been told, had been complete by having her own checking account. To her, the death of Catherine Barkley brought a fear that she who guards her life too well might lose it. A strange unease surrounded her heart. Was it possible that one had to earn one's death in order to become alive? And should no tragic pour strike for her, would it not mean that her own death would be nothing more than a mere sloughing off into earth of a husk no sun had warmly touched?

To this woman, watching her husband waving goodnight to friends in his well-lit door, he seemed unaware of that dark precipitous edge whereupon
both endured their days and nights together. She had no way of knowing that he, too, was secretly afraid.

If an increasing awareness of the precariousness of life is increase of wisdom, the death of Catherine Barkley made this woman wiser. And if the belief she had sustained in an afterlife was thereby shaken, it was because her own life began to feel like a sieve through which living hours kept draining.

Hemingway liked to say that he wrote on the principle of the iceberg that has seven-eighths under water for the one part showing above. And how aware he himself was of his own depths can only be guessed.

He knew he had the critics fooled, those who, like Macdonald, swallowed the image put out by one
Esquire
illustrator, depicting him machine-gunning sharks. That he would take a machine-gun to sea is as preposterous as it would be to take a howitzer on safari. That was the image all the same: The Violent American, the man of no memory all muscle and blood, standing with one foot on the head of a slain lion.

Among the critics, only Malcolm Cowley and Maxwell Ceismar have perceived that what Hemingway appeared to be—the Byronic reporter of the bullring, the boxing ring and battle—was only the surface of this writer. If he had been no more than this—had he been only the writer who most represented his time—he would never have provoked the attacks of the begrudgers. It was his submerged sources which troubled them so. For he did not represent his time at all: he made his time represent him. Because within him the whole buried burden of America's guilt, the self-destructiveness of a people who felt their lives were being lived by somebody else, found expression.

In a sense of longing and a sense of loss, Hemingway identified himself with the victims of America; as though those most unworthy of love were the most worthy of it.

His sketch, called
A Pursuit Race,
in which Campbell, an advance-man for a burlesque show, wearies of trying to stay one town ahead of the show, demonstrates Hemingway's early commitment to those who resigned not only from war, but from the race for Success.

“I'm hopped to the eyes,” Campbell tells Turner, his boss, when Turner finds him under the sheets in a cheap hotel. Then, rolling up his sleeve, Campbell reveals a line of purple blue punctures from elbow to wrist.

“They've got a cure for that,” Turner assures Campbell.

“They haven't got a cure for anything,” Campbell contradicts Turner.

Then, caressing the sheet with lips and tongue: “Dear sheet, I can kiss this sheet and see through it at the same time . . . Stick to sheets, Billy. Keep away from women and horses and eagles. If you love horses you'll get horseshit and if you love eagles you'll get eagleshit and if you love women you'll get a dose.”

“Are you alright?” Billy asks.

“I was never so happy in my life.”

This is not merely a story about drug addiction. It is a report on isolation as an American affliction.

Hemingway came of a strata so afflicted. His great innovation was not the devising of a literary style, but bringing to this class a realization of what was real and what was unreal. A realization for which he went back to the Old Testament.

The reason that the critics failed Hemingway is simple: they didn't read Hemingway. They read, instead, other critics of Hemingway.

“I did not try to see behind the façade,” an Italian critic admits with contentment, “nor what view of life was beyond that depersonalized style. This has been done, however, in Mr. Savage's essay.” He doesn't tell us what critic Mr. Savage went to to understand Hemingway.

Nevertheless—we have his word on it—that “Mr. Savage shows how the entire extrusion of personality into the outward sensational world makes Hemingway's characters the inwardly passive victims of a meaningless determinism; how the profound spiritual inertia, the inner vacuity and impotence, which is a mark of all Hemingway's projected characters, ends in a deadening sense of boredom and negation which can only be relieved by violent, though still essentially meaningless, activity; how the final upshot of it all is the total absence of a sense of life, so that life is brought into a sensational vividness only by contrast with the nullity of death.”

I never cease to be astonished when I see someone like this dealing with half a deck and nobody calling him on it. “The most essential gift for a good writer,” Hemingway told an interviewer, “is a built-in, shock-proof, shit-detector.” Almost any kind of detector would serve to detect what the above critic is spreading around.

Another charge the critics made against Hemingway consistently was that he was a man who wrote as though he had no memory. And yet it was Hemingway, and none other, whose memory was adequate enough to give new life to John Donne's sermon that no man is an island. For his memory worked in terms of a race-memory; whereas theirs was limited to the dates of their own reviews.

Nor was his style a clever trick, an acquired device that a clever young man, panting to get along in the world, picked up from Gertrude Stein, as Macdonald claims. It wasn't Hemingway who needed to follow Miss Stein around Paris with notebook and pencil poised, but Miss Stein who needed the pencil. His style was the means by which he fulfilled a need uniquely his own; thus filling a need of the company of men.

This need was for light and simplicity. In achieving it for himself he achieved it for others enduring a murky complexity. By strength of his own love he forced a door. That opened into a country in which, for those willing to risk themselves, love and death became realities.

For Hemingway, in his life as well as in his writing, always left a door wide for others to enter.

Robert Frost, at his 75th birthday party, found himself being introduced to Gene Tunney.

“How did it happen that Hemingway bloodied your nose?” Frost asked just that fast.

Tunney took a step back as though he'd just walked into a stiff jab.

“I was trying to teach him something,” Tunney remembered, “but you had to watch him every second.”

What Macdonald means, in saying that
he
had Hemingway's goat, is merely that Hemingway never considered him a worthy opponent.

Why should he? There's one in every crowd.

I once observed another bearded man trying to force another door: one of those little glass jobs of Horn & Hardart's. In the days when you had either to smash the glass or put in some nickels.

As a man of force, this one might have smashed a lemon chiffon pie without leaving an imprint unless he were using both hands and chocolate would have stopped him cold. He was a critic whose passion for nickels was barely surpassed by his concern for his corpuscles. Precisely, his passion was so corpuscular that, once had he announced himself as “The Diagnostician of our diseased culture,” the self-congratulatory tone was justified; as he himself was a charter member of the affliction.