BOOKS
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licized author and personality bewitched by his own publicity and an
imitator of his own style, is speaking to him directly.
Nevertheless this book does not exist in isolation from the author's
work as a whole, which gives it a greater significance and to which
it
gives a new definition and clarity. We see more clearly how for Heming–
way the kingdom of heaven, which is within us, is moral stamina; ex–
perience, stripped of illusion, is inexhaustible threat. Which should
make the reader recognize how purely American a writer Hemingway
is. For what is this sense of existence but the essential condition of the
pioneer? It is the terror and the isolation of the pioneer in the forest that
Hemingway seeks out in his prizefighters, gunmen, matadors, soldiers and
expatriate sportsmen. The hunting and fishing which were necessities
of life for the pioneer may be merely sports and games now, but they are
pursued with an energy and passion absent in other areas of existence
because only within the conditions of sport can a man be truly himself,
truly an individual, truly able to pit an isolated will and consciousness
against the whole of experience. In
To Have an·d To Have Not,
Hemingway tried to repudiate this sense of existence; in
For Whom the
Bell Tolls
he tried to go beyond it, but he wrote with all of his power
under control only when the hero was contained within guerilla warfare,
which is obviously Daniel Boone again; in
Across the River and Into
the Trees
there is an hysterical fury against modem warfare, for in
modem warfare the isolated individual can have no role purely as an
isolated individual. Now, after the bluster, bravado and truculence of
that book, his fresh possession of his own sensibility suggests the pos–
sibility of a new masterpiece.
If
one had no other information on the subject, the beginning of
Evelyn Waugh's
Men at Arms
would convince one that the Second
World War occurred solely to rescue Englishmen from boredom and
decadence. But if
one
happens to read next Angus Wilson's
Hemlock
and After,
one begins to see what Waugh has in mind, and
one
begins
to
be
afraid that so far as any redemption of England was at stake, the
war may well have been waged in vain. And it is only when
one
reads
Patrick O'Brian's
Testimcmies
that it becomes apparent how Waugh
and Wilson have permitted their subject matter to cripple their point
of view and sensibility.
Waugh's novel
is
the first part of a trilogy, a fact which both the
author and the publisher ought to have acknowledged with a little
more lucidity. The hero, moved by a noble patriotism, has returned
from a life of expatriate idleness in Italy to fight for England. His
