Sartre’s essay about Jules Renard, ultimately dismissing the search for the most economical way of writing a thing as the search for a way of being outside of “intelligence” – the latter classified as giving reflection its expanse and structure as it is construed in the urban tradition, rather than narrowing it to its reflexes as it is construed in the peasant tradition – was written during the phoney war, though published in 1944. At the same time, Cyril Connolly was revising his book, the Enemies of Promise, which was first published in 1938 and re-issued in the revised form in 1949.
Connolly was a member
of the “bright young things” generation, like Nancy Mitford, Harold Acton and
Evelyn Waugh, but he was always slightly a figure of fun for Mitford and Waugh.
The Ambrose Silk figure in Waugh’s phoney war novel, Put out more flags, has
definite echoes of Connolly, whose seriousness is disguised by an outward
silliness. Like Connolly, who founded and edited the great British magazine of
the war years, Horizon, Ambrose Silk busies himself with founding a magazine,
the Ivory Tower. Silk’s friend and underminer, the cheerful villain-hero, Basil
Seal, has a great time getting into British security and convincing them that
the magazine is a nest of Nazi spies, thus leading to the arrest of the writers
and the flight of Silk. and, in a grace note at the end of the novel, we see
Silk holed up in a small cottage in Ireland, in a revery about the British
imperial heroism. But Silk’s great speech, to a drunk Basil Seal and Silk’s
much trodden upon publisher, sets the tone of the novel and – secretly, I think
– Waugh’s own view of where things were trending:
“European scholarship has nover lost its
monastic character… Chinese scholarship dealt with taste and wisdom, not with
memorizing of facts. In China, the man whom we make a don sat for the Imperial
examinations and became a bureaucrat. Their scholars were lonely men of few
books and fewer pupils, content with a single concubine, a pine tree and the
prospect of a stream. Eureopan culture has become conventual; we must make it
coenobitic.”
This is a nice parody
of Enemies of Promise. Waugh always knew just where to stick the knife in.
The Enemies of Promise
is full of summaries of the literature of the twentieth century, and spends
much time on the question: how to write a book that lasts a decade. The
subject, of course, brings up and loses one in fashion: in the game of who is
up and who is down. Because the “memorizing of facts” is cast aside in this
game, the whole thing depends on the critic’s impression. Although Connolly
doesn’t know it, his book, in 1939 and in 1949, was already an anachronism.
Connolly was too much of a bright young thing to see that the Program era was
upon us: the incredible expansion of higher education, and with it the
annexation of literature by academia.
In the Enemies of
Promise, Connolly treats Hemingway, whom he sure is now out of fashion, to a
species of reasoning not unlike that laid on Renard by Sartre. Hemingway, too, wrote
with a kind of cult of silence – except in his case it was a cult of toughness.
Wordiness and toughness were antithetical. To a criticism of his style by
Aldous Huxley, Hemingway wrote a reply in Death in the Afternoon, which
contains an interesting defence of his own choices in writing:
“Prose is
architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to
put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as
essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters, which are more
remunerative when issued as people in a novel, is good economics, perhaps, but
does not make literature. People in a novel, not skilfully constructed
characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from
his knowledge, from his head, from his heart, and from all there is of him; If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and
gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last
a long time.”
I like Hemingway,
while recognizing how much masculinist bullshit lies in comparing prose to “architecture”
instead of “interior decoration.” For Whom the Bell Tolls is as Baroque as all
fuck, and at the time Hemingway went around saying that he read Donne’s sermons
for encouragement.
At the same time,
Hemingway obviously had a style – the “dumb ox” style that Wyndham Lewis ranted
about. Unlike Jules Renard, Hemingway was not born and raised among peasants.
His ancestors came from solid New England stock. But the Midwest of Hemingway’s
time, and now, did have its own distinctive silence: American Gothic is its
totem. The way in which Hemingway speaks of “bulking up” the novel with a
buncha interior decoration to make more money speaks to a very Midwest ethos:
the farmer that gives good weight, as opposed to the farmer who waters his
stock. The Midwest silence is something I have witnessed. The parents of an old
ex-friend of mine were Midwesterners of the American Gothic type, who could sit
in a room with people they didn’t know and not say anything, not ask a
question, not make a remark. This is the heavy silence of a million dinner tables in Iowa, Illinois,
Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, where the competition between opening your mouth
to speak and opening your mouth to eat was right out there in the open – and the
latter was preferred.
This silence, to
Connolly, Hemingway’s tell: “It is a style in which the body talks rather than
the mind, one admirable for rendering emotions; love, fear, joy of battle,
despair, sexual appetite, but impoverished for intellectual purposes. Hemingway
is fortunate in possessing a physique which is at home in the world of boxing,
bull-fighting and big game shooting, fields closed to most writers and
especially to Mandarins; he is supreme in the domain of violence and his
opportunity will be to write the great book (and there have been no signs of
one so far), about the Spanish war.”
Connolly was not
intelligent like Sartre was intelligent: the mandarin and the engaged writer are
two very different approaches to literature and even life. But they are in
agreement with what Derrida called the White Mythology, made up of oppositions
such as that of the mind to the body, emotion to reflection, and their
consequent styles. When a Hemingway character is presented so wholly from the
outside, to this way of thinking, the inside is drained of its depth. While the
writer of fiction doesn’t have to present the thought process going on the inside
of the heads of his “characters” – that word Hemingway did not like – the idea
is that conversation will carry that burden, that there is a seal, a pact,
between the thought and the spoken. When that pact is not honored – when what a
character speaks does not give one a picture of what the character thinks,
which is where Hemingway’s “toughness” comes in – then the critic, the bearer
of the oppositions we enumerated above, reverts to the idea that intelligence
has been sacrificed to economy. For gesture and act is dumb, in the double sense:
unspeaking and unreflective.
And if gesture and act are not dumb?
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