To the Editor:

Kenneth S. Lynn’s “Hemingway’s Private War” [July] is yet another unfortunate example of what happens to scholars who venture out of their own fields—in this case, history—into the treacherous realms of psychology and literary criticism. There is little point in disputing Mr. Lynn’s fatuous conclusion—that most of Hemingway’s work stemmed from a violent hatred of his mother. But there is a point, I think, in trying to rescue the reputations of some of the eminent literary critics whom Mr. Lynn savages along the way.

Mr. Lynn begins by opening fire on Edmund Wilson—big game indeed. Wilson, he says, “took it upon himself to improve [Hemingway’s short story “Big Two-Hearted River”] by making it more explicit.” For support he cites two different opinions of Wilson’s on the story. A rather strange technique. Can a critic who changes his mind about a work really be accused of trying to resolve its ambiguities?

Mr. Lynn seems to see the difficulty himself; he switches attack plans in midstream. Noting that Wilson made his first remark while he was still flirting with Marxism, and his second after he had become disillusioned with the Soviet Union, Mr. Lynn concludes that the whole affair is proof of “the extent to which [Wilson’s] literary sensibility was ruled by political nausea.” Perhaps this is a bit hasty. What did Wilson actually say? Well, first that Nick Adams’s war experiences—“the wholesale shattering of human beings in which he has taken part”—gave him the “touch of panic” evident in “Big Two-Hearted River”; and second, that Hemingway’s “whole work is a criticism of society.” To claim that either remark smacks of Marxism, or disillusionment with it, is stretching things. And to adduce the remarks as evidence of Wilson’s “political nausea,” as Mr. Lynn does, is less an insult to Wilson’s political sensibilities than to Mr. Lynn’s own. . . . Mr. Lynn spots Communist sympathizers behind every tree and is unfailingly vigilant in hunting them out. Which leads, of course, to the classic irony: Mr. Lynn accuses Wilson of precisely the offense of which he himself is guilty.

Wilson’s comments on “Big Two-Hearted River,” while controversial—like all good criticism—are hardly unreasonable or out of the critical mainstream. Mr. Lynn is right when he points out that World War I is never specifically mentioned in the story, but there is considerable outside evidence, from Hemingway’s life and work, for the theory that Nick Adams served in the war. Besides, is Wilson’s theory any more wrong-headed than Mr. Lynn’s belief that “Big Two-Hearted River” was born out of Hemingway’s obsessive need to escape his mother? Most literary critics wouldn’t think so.

Will Mr. Lynn ever tire of picking on Malcolm Cowley? . . . He singled Cowley out for abuse in his article on Max Perkins a few years ago [“The Strange Unhappy Life of Max Perkins,” December 1978] and this year’s attack is a variation of the theme. Cowley, Mr. Lynn says, used his introduction to The Viking Portable Hemingway as a vehicle for “continuing his assault on the moral credentials of capitalist society.” Never mind that Cowley wrote the essay in 1944, four years after even Mr. Lynn concedes that he had finished apologizing for the Stalinists. And never mind that most of the stories Cowley discusses are set in non-capitalist countries. Mr. Lynn still accuses Cowley of what he accused Wilson of: informing his literary criticism with political sentiment.

A weighty charge indeed. And the evidence? One passage from Cowley’s essay in which he claims that “these countries [mostly foreign ones, from Hemingway’s book of short stories, In Our Time] are presented in a strangely mortuary light. In no other writer of our time can you find such a profusion of corpses.” And Cowley proceeds to reel off a long list.

This happens to be true. There really are a lot of dead bodies—and particularly disgusting ones—in In Our Time. But Mr. Lynn never disputes Cowley on this important point. All he says is that “it must have felt like vindication to write these words, and to append to them [a] long list of fearsome illustrations.” Maybe so, but that hardly invalidates the passage as accurate literary criticism.

So Mr. Lynn, as he did with Wilson, shifts his tactics. Now he asks: “Was it really accurate, though, to say that Hemingway had presented France, Spain, Switzerland, the United States, and the other countries he knew as a series of hypnagogic visions?” Certainly not! My Oxford English Dictionary defines “hypnagogic” as “inducing or leading to sleep.” I’m sure we can all agree that Hemingway’s visions are anything but that. Diction aside, though, Mr. Lynn tries to boil the argument down to his old standby. “In the end,” he writes, “all the credibility of [Cowley’s] ‘nightmares at noonday’ interpretation was invested in his comments on ‘Big Two-Hearted River.’”

This is simply wrong. In fact, of the “long list of fearsome illustrations” that Cowley appended to his remark on Hemingway’s corpses, none comes from “Big Two-Hearted River.” But grant the point for a moment. According to Mr. Lynn, the problem with Cowley’s interpretation of the story is that his “Nick Adams is in far worse psychological shape than Edmund Wilson’s.” Well, suppose that Lynn is right and Cowley wrong; suppose that Nick Adams is not the psychological cripple Cowley and Wilson say he is. That hardly bodes well for Mr. Lynn’s own theory that Nick Adams is “a man so angry at his mother that he could not even forget her when he was off on a fishing trip.” And Mr. Lynn contradicts himself even more neatly later, speaking of “the malaise that underlies Nick’s happiness in ‘Big Two-Hearted River.’”

Mr. Lynn’s critique of the Hemingway critics conspicuously fails to address the central issue—the work itself. Instead he concentrates on trying to assign political motives to the critics he disagrees with. Neither Wilson nor Cowley—nor Philip Young nor Carlos Baker nor Allen Tate, who are among the other critics Mr. Lynn takes to task for much the same reasons—had the political axe to grind that Mr. Lynn tries to put in their hands. Only Mr. Lynn himself is left holding the axe.

Aaron Haspel
New York City

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To the Editor:

By discounting the criticism of Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley on the works of Ernest Hemingway, Kenneth S. Lynn diminishes the man and the writer. Great literature can bear any burden, even Whitman’s contradictions. Why cannot the parent-child conflict be interrelated with the wound thesis? This is exactly what Philip Young tried to do in his critical biography of Hemingway.

Wilson and Cowley were part of a generation that went off to war for fun and ideals, a new kind of “grand tour.” They returned wounded, if not physically, spiritually. Marxism was only part of their critical approach to the writers of their generation. No one, for example, can fault Robert Penn Warren or the late Richard Chase for being Marxists. By expanding on the earlier critics, Warren, in his introduction to the Scribner A Farewell to Arms, and Chase, in his doctoral seminars that I was privileged to attend at Columbia University during the late 50’s, both linked the maimed hero with the young man’s initiation into society, using the wound as a yardstick by which a person could measure his capacities.

Any war veteran knows the trauma of a wound, just as he is aware of the difficulties of readjusting to civilian life after being through the abnormally accelerated life-death cycle that should naturally fill a lifespan. Can one doubt that what happened to Hemingway on the banks of the Togliamento River at age nineteen was taken lightly, as Mr. Lynn would have us believe, Hemingway’s letters to his parents to the contrary?

Thirty years later, that wound always on his mind in the constant pain he bore in his knee, Hemingway describes in Across the River and into the Trees (a title taken from another wounded and dying man’s words, General Stonewall Jackson) how Colonel Cantwell was wounded. “Finally he did get hit properly and for good. No one of his wounds has ever done to him what the first big one did. I suppose it was just the loss of immortality, he thought.” . . .

Two years before he died, I met Ernest Hemingway in Pamplona, Spain. For one hour he talked about his many wounds. The most revealing thing about that monologue at the Txoko Bar was that he never mentioned “the big one.” That happened to be on July 8, 1959, exactly forty-one years after he nearly died “up on the Grappa,” as he called it. . . .

“I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it,” says Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises. In not caring, Hemingway found in the postwar years a way to bear his wound: stoicism and “the giant killer,” as he called booze. In those years Hemingway would work out his obsessive concern with “the way you die,” the way he almost died. Dying for him was obscene. Catherine Barkley, in A Farewell to Arms, says to Frederick Henry as she lies dying, “Don’t touch me,” reminiscent of the uncleanliness of death as depicted in the Bible, as is still felt by Jews who after visiting cemeteries wash their hands. Can we deny D.H. Lawrence’s words about dying being a major American theme?

Finally, as critics have pointed out, the concept of the wound changed in Hemingway. From the moment Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not (we are now in the 30’s and the Depression) says, “a man alone ain’t got no bloody chance,” through Hemingway’s next novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, we see the healing of the wound. Not that it is ever forgotten. The “nada y pues nada” and Frederick Henry’s “separate peace” now become “No man is an island,” the Hemingway hero himself, as Young claimed, rejoining society through commitment to it, thus finding justification for his wound as well as his father’s suicide. Mr. Lynn’s theory might find common ground here with the critics he attacks.

In The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling said that in Hemingway’s stories “a strongly charged piety toward the ideals and attachments of boyhood and the lusts of maturity is in conflict not only with the imagination of death but also with that imagination as it is peculiarly modified by the dark negation of the modern world.” Here is another non-Marxist critic who sees the connection between family conflict and the wound as a symbol of disenchantment with the dark world.

Hemingway ascribed to “the way you die” the most significant test of man’s endurance. But how does one go beyond the grave? Find the equivalent of death? This he did through his wound. Frederick Henry’s soul and body fly in and out and back to him when he is wounded. Young Nick asks his father: “Is dying hard, Daddy?” to which Doctor Adams responds, “It all depends.” The wound theme as well as the parent-son relationship fit into the pattern of this short dialogue from “Indian Camp.” On what it all depended was what Hemingway tried to find out.

Daniel Spicehandler
Department of Humanities
SUNY-Maritime College
Fort Schuyler, New York

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To the Editor:

Kenneth S. Lynn should not don the shield of omniscience unless he is omniscient. He mercilessly flays others who may have committed errors in fact or lapses in judgment (Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley inter alios), but he himself is guilty of those deviations.

To begin with, Mr. Lynn could not apparently decide what the focal point of his essay would be; consequently, he gets lost in many a labyrinthine detour with the main road (whatever that might have been) never clearly in sight. Sometimes it seems that Mr. Lynn’s central goal is to show how Hemingway’s letters complement the picture of Hemingway’s psyche as revealed in his fiction; at other times it appears that Mr. Lynn’s thesis is to excoriate those post-World War II critics who inaccurately used Hemingway’s post-World War I fiction to bolster their attack on American society; occasionally, Mr. Lynn isolates those tangled strands of Hemingway’s psyche which seem to focus on his mother. The reader is never sure which is the main ring in this three-ring circus.

Furthermore, Mr. Lynn, who seems to rejoice in finding factual flaws in the work of other critics (Malcolm Cowley is found guilty of not giving “the correct year of Hemingway’s birth”), is not beyond some boo-boos himself. For example, he writes; “In Huckleberry Finn, for instance, Huck’s decision at the end of the book to cross over into the Oklahoma Territory for a few weeks of howling adventures with Tom Sawyer and Nigger Jim before returning to his home town in Missouri was transformed by post-World War II critics into a decision to secede forever from American society, because American society sickened the boy.”

Now this is an extraordinary statement. If Mr. Lynn goes back to the last chapter, he will discover that (1) the several weeks of “howling adventures” (a phrase Tom Sawyer uses) are proposed as a possibility but never actually carried out after Huck finds out from Jim that Huck’s father is dead; (2) the book ends with Huck’s decision not to return to his home town in Missouri because Aunt Sally is “going to adopt me and sivilize [sic] me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

Finally, if Mr. Lynn has not already done so, he should read the introductory essays to Twain’s novel by Lionel Trilling (1948) and by T.S. Eliot (1950); he will discover that here are two critics at least who did not “transform” Huck’s decision to join Jim and Tom in the nonexistent “howling adventures” for the critics’ own nefarious, propagandistic purposes.

Attacking liberal critics—or any kind of critics—when they are wrong is fair game; however, misrepresentation—even when unintentional—is not the way to achieve a convincing victory.

Milton Birnbaum
Dean, School of Arts and Sciences
American International College
Springfield, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

Kenneth S. Lynn’s use of Carlos Baker’s recent collection of the Ernest Hemingway letters to trace the inspirational source of some of Hemingway’s stories and novels yields some interesting insights into those works and into Hemingway’s real life. Mr. Lynn’s discipline as a historian is also effective in exposing the presumptuous, wide-of-the-mark analyses of such prestigious literary critics as Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Allen Tate, and others.

Decoding the crypto-significance of Hemingway’s short stories and novels . . . is an entertaining exercise in literary detection. But of what utility? It is axiomatic, indeed bromidic, that a work of fiction, like any other work of art, should be judged on its own terms and not because of its correspondence to or flight from reality. Just as the flesh-and-blood model used by a painter or sculptor is of only minor historical importance in judging the canvas or the marble, so are the autobiographical origins of characters and scenes in a work of fiction of small weight on the scales of its merit. Moreover, literary license certainly is broad enough to permit a single fictional character to be created from a composite of many real life people. Or, . . . he may be a tri-part clone of Hemingway himself. . . .

In his foreword to Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe made the point: “If the writer has used clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using.”

Sidney Z. Karasik
Highland Park, Illinois

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Kenneth S. Lynn writes:

I am distressed to learn that Aaron Haspel does not know that I used to be a professor of English at Harvard before I became a professor of history at Johns Hopkins, and that I have been publishing books and essays on a wide variety of American literary figures for more than a quarter of a century.

But I am even more cast down by the unrelieved oddity of Mr. Haspel’s ensuing remarks. Nothing he says makes any sense. My essay most certainly does not conclude by saying that most of Hemingway’s work stemmed from a violent hatred of his mother. I also do not know what Mr. Haspel is talking about when he says that I cite two different opinions by Edmund Wilson about the meaning of “Big Two-Hearted River.” As my essay makes clear, Wilson had only one opinion, which was informed by his political nausea. Why Mr. Haspel is upset by those words, political nausea, is another mystery. I am by no means the first person who has applied them to Wilson, and no one who has read The Wound and the Bow, in which his Hemingway essay appears, or who has pondered his famous “sea-slug” introduction to Patriotic Gore, or who is familiar with his troubles with the IRS, will doubt the accuracy of the description.

Mr. Haspel’s comments on what I have to say about Malcolm Cowley are equally wild. I did not say, nor did I imply, that Cowley’s listing of the corpses in Hemingway’s stories contained illustrations from “Big Two-Hearted River.” I said, rather, that the overall credibility of Cowley’s death-in-life interpretation of Hemingway rested on his repeated references to that celebrated story, and that he had badly misrepresented its meaning. Mr. Haspel also seems unaware that the word “hypnagogic” was Cowley’s before it became mine, so if he thinks that Hemingway’s visions “are anything but that,” then he should complain to Cowley.

Mr. Haspel is wrong again when he says that I deny that Nick Adams is some sort of psychological cripple; what I actually say is that Hemingway, unlike Wilson, Cowley, Young, and other critics, never identifies the exact nature of Nick’s undeniable malaise. Finally, I am flabbergasted by Mr. Haspel’s belief that I take issue with the literary criticism of Allen Tate. Every careful reader of my essay knows that Tate’s views are quoted there for the purpose of buttressing my own.

Daniel Spicehandler implies that a fun-loving Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley received their first spiritual wounds in World War I. I disagree. Wilson, like Hemingway, has left us with ample autobiographical evidence that he was a troubled child before he became a troubled man. About Cowley’s childhood I cannot speak with the same confidence, for in Exile’s Return, the first of his personal histories, he is disappointingly uncandid about his formative years. In time, though, a diligent biographer may very well be able to demonstrate that Cowley’s profound alienation from American life did not originate on the battlefields of Europe.

Although “Chapter the Last” in Huckleberry Finn is only two pages long, Milton Birnbaum has managed to misread it. The chapter begins with a description, in Huck’s words, of the next adventure’ that Tom Sawyer has in mind for them, now that Nigger Jim is a free man. “What he had planned in his head . . . was for us to run [Jim] down the river, on the raft, and have adventures plumb to the mouth of the river, and then . . . take him back up home on a steamboat, in style, and pay him for his lost time, and write word ahead and get out all the niggers around, and have them waltz him into town with a torchlight procession and a brass band, and then he would be a hero, and so would we.” Tom subsequently amends this idea and proposes that he and Huck and Jim “go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the Territory, for a couple of weeks or two.”

Huck thinks Tom’s ideas are grand, but he decides to light out for the Oklahoma Territory a little ahead of his companions, because he is aware that Aunt Sally Phelps, on whose “one-horse” plantation near Pikesville, Arkansas he has been living for some time, is about to “adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” In other words, Huck doesn’t want to live in respectability on a plantation in Arkansas, he wants to go back to St. Petersburg, Missouri and live in a hogshead, as he had been doing when we first met him in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. We later learn from Huck, in the sequel to Huckleberry Finn called Tom Sawyer Abroad, that Tom’s gaudy dream of further adventures followed by a triumphant return to St. Petersburg came true: “You see,” says Huck, “when we three came back up the river in glory, as you may say, from that long travel, and the village received us with a torchlight procession and speeches, and everybody hurrah’d and shouted, it made us heroes, and that was what Tom Sawyer had always been hankering to be.”

What Huck Finn’s travel plans were as he prepared to leave Arkansas seem pretty clear. Yet in the 1950’s, a rising generation of disaffected literary critics turned a projected vacation trip into a drastic, final gesture of alienation and rejection. Huck Finn was lighting out for the Territory, and he was never going to come back. In the 1980’s, Mr. Birnbaum still swears by that misreading, for reasons which I think I know.

Sidney Z. Karasik begins his letter with a couple of compliments, for which I am grateful. But then he asks of what utility it is to locate the inspirational source of some of Hemingway’s best-known works in the tensions of his private life. No more and no less utility, I would say, than to discuss Shakespeare’s plays in the light of his intellectual debt to Montaigne, or to connect Stendhal’s novels to the events of post-Napoleonic politics.